Once upon a time a Mother is making breakfast for her daughter —breakfast is ready, she doesn’t hear her daughter stirring so she goes to her room where she is still sound asleep. She says, “My dear, it’s Sunday morning, almost time for church, you must wake up!”

“I don’t want to get up,” the daughter protests groggily.

“Why not?” Her mother asks. 

“I’ll give you three reasons: One, the sermons are too long. Two, the chairs are too hard. And three, the hymns are too hard to sing.”

The mother quickly responds, “I’ll give you three reasons why you should get up and go: One, church is good for you. Two, the people are friendly and three, You're the minister!”

I thought this joke would be a good way to start my essay on the theme of “balance.” We are often met with the hard choice between responsibility and sloth—the most tempting to me of the seven deadly sins. Laughter is one way to achieve balance between the oh-so-serious and the ridiculous. 

Who has not, whether minister, mother, student, teacher, or whatever your vocation occasionally felt a bit off balance, a bit teetery or tottery from time to time? I know I do. I wake up in the morning wondering how to balance my day between tasks that I would like to do and  tasks that should be done. I am worried about obligations undreamed of or forgotten that will require even more hours and efforts—how will I still make time for my family, friends  and myself? When will there ever be a let up?

It’s all a balancing act—and I can imagine others in and out of other professions have this dilemma in these days when we are all so overwhelmed with tasks, media saturation, new things to learn, old things to remember, and responsibilities to our friends and loved ones that tax the mind, body and spirit. I call it all just “too muchness.” All the balls we are supposed to be juggling, keeping up there in the air, have a way of falling and hitting us smack on the toes and rolling away. (A mentor early once warned me—every year in our lives there is a ball that will be dropped, don’t worry, next year you’ll catch it but there will be a different one.)

Imagine for a moment, what picture comes into your mind when you hear the word “balance”? You may see an image of a circus act where the high wire artist tip toes along a rather loosely strung wire, holding a long stick, swaying from side to side precariously but still graceful, while the audience gasps and sighs, holds its collective breath and then applauds loudly when the performer arrives safely and smiling on the other side, or perhaps falls into the safety net below amidst more gasps. Isn’t life like that sometimes, but without the gasps, ohs and ahs, and applause when we pull it off!

Perhaps an index of one’s spiritual maturity is achieving, at least most of the time, this confounding thing called balance: What would that entail? We come face to face, bumping up against the opposite poles—To serve others while setting aside time to renew oneself; to foster community while respecting our needs for privacy; to be faithful to our life’s calling without becoming frantic about not being perfect enough: to be generous with our own personal resources without risking the lack of funds or time for our own personal needs and desires.

We all know some people who are so busy earning a living, raising children, trying to be a success by making their mark on the world, that they need to sometimes just stop and breathe. To just slow down. Other people, have so few goals except to survive each day, they may be too lacking in energy and purpose, too stuck within their own problems and personal comfort zones to risk doing more or trying something new. Perhaps they need to speed up. To achieve balance is always a personal thing. Only you and I can judge as life throws its challenges and satisfactions at us while we are making other plans.

Getting in balance is ever changing and oftentimes requires the skill of a tightrope walker, walking across the rope in a heavy wind, in a thunderstorm, during an earthquake. I find also that the balance point always seems to be moving and shifting, never quite there, always elusive as perfect love. And yet, like love when found, just as rewarding. I firmly believe there is something within us, conscious or unconscious that wants us to attain some kind of equilibrium. At least from time to time.

What happens when our personal scales are wheee! off balance, way off balance? That is when we quiver with fears, anxieties, fatigue, relationship melodramas, sometimes to the extremes of addictions and obsessions. When we stagger along emotionally, we spend too much time distracted by one thing, spend too much or too little money. We may talk too much, sleep too much, eat too much or too little, drink or smoke too much. We all know too well the signs in ourselves and others of struggling in the deep end, without knowing how to tread water.

All right, I know, all of us who have tried hard for anything know there are times in our lives when we have to become unbalanced to get what we want. I would guess that just about everyone here has had to live through the urgent situations, just to get where we are today: we remember times like working one’s way through college, taking care of children (by the way, I know the parental emergency may seem like forever but it is soon over), having to go the extra mile, or two or more, taking care of babies, troubled or sick friends and elderly relatives. And then there is the delirium of happy love affairs and and often its unhappy extremes, of pulling all-nighters to finish a paper, of preparing bleary-eyed for a test, working overtime because the boss says so, or getting out the campaign literature in time before the election--Stuffing and licking those mountains of envelopes before the mail leaves—all those dreaded deadlines and demands.

Things go all out of wack, the fulcrum wobbles from side to side, up and down. The center does not hold, the poet was so right. And yet, we keep our sanity by knowing that there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is not a train coming toward us. This world does not just seem unbalanced, the earth is moving under our feet and it’s not an earthquake. Especially these days as we all too well know. To achieve balance we must be aware of the opposites, did I say aware ? The masculine and feminine, the individual and the planet, the public and private, recreation and earning a living, the need to relax and the need to get everything done ASAP, on time, meeting a deadline. The only solution? It won’t be easy--we need to embrace the opposites sometimes, accept them, knowing this is just one time in our lives. Next week or next year will probably be different. Or we can hope.

Sometimes the most balance, the most harmony is found in the scale that is not exactly balanced all the time: sometimes one side is up, sometimes the other, one element is emphasized more than the other. To embrace the paradoxes means to allow ambiguity in, the abstract, the dissonant, the unfinished. True harmony means standing back, way back and looking at the bigger picture.

Here is an example, from those folksy philosophers of yore, the Beverly Hillbillies.

Jed Clampett is speaking: “Pearl, what d’ya think? Think I oughta move?”

Cousin Pearl answers: “Jed, how can ya even ask? Look around yar. You're eight miles from your nearest neighbor. Yore overrun with skunks, possums, coyotes, bobcats.  You use kerosene lamps fer light and you cook on a wood stove summer and winter. Y’re drinkin’ homemade moonshine and washin with homemade lye soap. An yore bathroom is fifty feet from the house and you ask ‘should I move?”

Jed answers: “I reckin you’re right, Pearl. A man’d be a dang fool to leave all this!”

So often our lives can sing in harmony when we recognize that what we already have is exactly what we want—rather than to go striving after other things. Actually, Jed Clampett is quite Thoreauvian, he is saying exactly what the great writer about balance and harmony, H.D. Thoreau said when he praised his life at Walden Pond. A person is living a life in balance in relation to the satisfaction achieved from a simple life, in relation to his or her lack of wants and needs. Or as Peter Lathan said back in the nineteenth century also, “Fortunate is the one who takes exactly the right measure of oneself and holds a just balance between what one can acquire and what one can use.”

To achieve balance in our lives we must look again at our involvement with how we consume and spend money, acquiring goods, paying for services. Do the scales sometimes tip erratically? Can we be happy with what we have? How can we balance play and work, love and anger, service and solitude, tears and laughter? Don’t turn for much help to our Western Philosophy: it is strangely lacking in counsel on this matter. A look at another culture can offer us better symbols of balance and harmony such as the familiar symbol from Eastern thought the Yin/Yang. We need to look at other traditions that offer more symbols of balance and harmony. Japanese flower arranging, for example, that places precisely the three flowers in a bouquet, representing sky, the human and the earth, each is important to the meaning and beauty of the over-all arrangement—no element is to be taken by itself.

From Taoism comes the Yin Yang, my favorite symbolic reminder—the design of harmony and balance of everything. Within a single unity, we see two equal and opposite forces, one quiet, the other active, yet each essential to the whole. Light and dark, male and female, good and evil, all are described in terms of opposites. Yet neither is ever to be considered alone, neither is ever a final answer.

The Taoists, while rejecting the quest for immortality, were certainly concerned with “living out one’s natural term of life ... ” But they are also saying that the chances of survival are best when there is no anxiety to survive, and that the greatest power is available to those who do not seek power and who do not use force. To be anxious to survive is to wear oneself out, and to seek power and to use force is to overstrain one’s system.  One is best preserved by floating along with out stress. Even in Jesus’ time he counseled his followers: “Do not be anxious for the morrow, that will take care of itself.” In other words, look to this day. And consider this idea very seriously from the Mother of all Religions—Hinduism—from the Bhagavad Gita’s principle of action—do it but don’t be concerned for the outcome. This theme flows gently through so much of the spiritual wisdom of the world.

They say preachers preach what they most need to learn themselves. I think I wanted to explore this subject because in truth it is what I most need to wake up to: To reconcile whatever goals or ambition I might have with acceptance of the reality: What do I want to do with my one precious life? First, I have to not feel guilty if I take an occasional day off or leave everyone working hard at something while I take an hour off to go swimming, to tell my partner who so often has great ideas for our co-participation that I would like some solitude every day. To feel okay if I spend an evening reading poetry instead of polishing up my Spanish. You who have children or demanding jobs know what I mean.

We may from time to time master the Circus tightrope, but never completely tame those wild animals in the cages below. Wouldn’t want to. Living a balanced life, takes courage—which comes from the French word for heart, from the heart. Heart force. To try and sometimes fail, to use our reason and our emotions, to be willing to touch and be touched, to withdraw physically when we need to from time to time and to reach out when we are called to that. To live our lives with passionate involvement but without undue attachment--which will only lead to suffering is our first requirement from the Buddhists. This is truly a condition devoutly to be tested. Let’s love ourselves enough to be aware—to slow down when we need to, to speed up when we have to, to tip the scales slightly when we want to and seek along the path that delicate place called balance.

And now, as a way to enjoy a moment of being gently poised, between silence and words, action and stillness, let’s take a pause from these words, close our eyes, and enter a land of silence. I invite you to breathe gently in an image of balance between listening to someone else and listening to your own wisdom from your own hearts and minds.

“Sisters, brothers, take your time go slowly.
Listen deep within yourself, simple things are holy.”

Blessed be.

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