Mistakes I Wish I Had Made

I got this sermon topic from a colleague. My friend the Rev. Calvin Dame of the Augusta, Maine church is in the ministerial study group I join for reflection each spring and fall near Boston. Like many of us, Calvin auctions off a sermon each year at the annual church fundraiser. Last year, people were already bidding a lot of money - he’s a very good preacher - when someone made an extraordinary proposal. They said they would bid double the last bid if they could give him the topic the morning he was preaching it. Calvin went for it - he said if they got it to him by 9am, he’d preach it at 10:30.

This, of course upped the ante, and the sermon went for a lot of money. And when the fateful morning came, the parishioner called Rev. Dame with the topic, an excellent and fair one for the circumstances: Mistakes I wish I had made. Calvin told us this story at our most recent gathering, and we all exclaimed in amazement at many parts - at the deal they struck at the auction, the amount the sermon raised, and the topic selected. Many of us were struck by the theme, and I stored it away to reflect on further myself. Though it’s not exactly the way I’ve put it in thoughts I’ve had, it relates strongly to some ideas I have about my life and the choices we face in life generally. So I decided to borrow the topic, reflect on it in advance, and preach it... for free.

I consider myself a generally risk averse person. I’ve never gotten terribly drunk or taken drugs. All my life I’ve had the pervasive sense that life is not only precious but terribly vulnerable - so we need to be careful with ourselves if we want to live. And I’ve always taken life very seriously. So the list I came up with, in thinking on this sermon, was a funny mix. James Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Maybe that only holds for men, or only those of genius, because some mistakes I’ve made or wish I’d made, well, they would certainly have led to discovery, but not impressive, National Geographic level discovery. For instance, I wish I’d once dyed my hair blonde. I wouldn’t have kept it for more than a day, maybe a week tops. I’ve always wondered what I would look like, and never did it when I was younger. The older I got, the more potentially inappropriate it became. At this point, it would be ridiculous - but I still wish I’d done it.

Many years ago, when I was a seminarian at Harvard, working as a student minister at the UU church in Carlisle, Massachusetts, I used to go out dancing with other friends from the Divinity school. We especially liked a band called Eye to Eye. Eye to Eye was a super funk dance band with a talented group of musicians, a very charismatic lead singer, and a couple of great guy dancers, who all shared the stage and put on a terrific show. One night we were dancing at a club where they were playing and a woman came over to me and gave me her card and identified herself as the band’s manager. She offered me a summer job joining the band as another dancer. I couldn’t believe it. It would actually have worked with my summer schedule. I didn’t do it, because I thought it would be too weird - ministerial student by day, backup dancer by night. But I’ve often wondered what it would’ve been like - and after all, I am talking about mistakes, not right decisions, I wish I’d made. That summer they won the Boston Music Award for best funk/dance band of the year.

There’s a couple more items on my list - buying a wild foal at the annual Chincoteague round-up on the Eastern shore, going to have my tarot cards read by a professional with a neon sign up on some street somewhere...but there aren’t a lot more.

I spoke to my mother when I was in the middle of writing this sermon and she maintains that much as I believe myself to be risk-averse, she has grown old watching me choose to follow my heart. She has a long list:

In college I majored in English.
I also majored in Studio Art.
I went alone to live in Greece, a country where I knew no one and didn’t speak the language.
I stayed there almost three years.
I rode around there amongst all the crazy drivers, on a motorcycle.
As a young, single, career-minded woman, I decided to become a... minister.
etc.

Of course, that is at worst, a list of mistakes I went ahead and made. And while we joke about it, neither of us really considers them mistakes, though some of those choices were harder for her to deal with than others. She in line with Oscar Wilde on this one: “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

Those of us familiar with twelve-step programs know that one of the promises held out by those programs is that we will have no regrets about past events. When I was a 12-stepper, that was one of the most attractive, and improbable, promises. I had a lot of regrets back then, and couldn’t imagine being free of them.

While I’m no longer in a 12-step program, I’m still very mindful of some of the lasting gifts I got from it. And perhaps the most important to me is that I do have few regrets. And even fewer of those regrets are about what I did, or what happened to me, in the past. I’ve made my peace with that, and as well with such regrets as I bear about roads not taken.

What has helped me to this is all the risks I have taken. Within a fairly conventional exterior, my life has become unconventional. And the most unconventional of my choices have also been the best. Being true to myself has paid off in the long run, though not always in the short run. When I finished college, all my friends knew what they wanted and where they were going, what they were doing next. I had no idea what to do with my life. I felt like a failure because of my confusion. English and Studio Art had been powerful motivators, but not pathways, at least not as far as I could see then.

Only years later did my choices, my experiences, the things I loved to do: think, read, sing, act, talk, experience new things and exotic places, study history and philosophy and culture and belief begin to cohere into a path. One day I realized that all these interests and passions were like spokes on a wheel, and ministry was the hub that would hold them together and send the wheel rolling.

Now when I encounter people unsure of what to do, where their lives are going, I try to tell them what I wish someone had told me years ago; be true to yourself, try the things you yearn for, pay attention to what matters, pay attention to what you learn from what matters, and you will find a path. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, what matters is that you pay attention and live according to who you are, not who you wish you were. You will get where you need to be.

It’s interesting to reflect on choices I’ve made and realize which mistakes I wish I’d made. But more importantly the same process reminds me that the risks I’ve taken are the most important, best things I’ve done in my life. Those risks I took were not silly, were not choices I made in a moment. I took my risks thoughtfully. As an art major I worked in every medium I could and in every aspect of the field, including in galleries, to see if there was a place for me there. When I went to Greece, I made sure that I was qualified to get a job there, that I could get accident and health insurance, that I had enough money saved to get by on while I looked for work. And with all my forethought, it was only when I got there that I realized how hard it was really going to be to live there on my own.

People have sometimes asked me how I go about writing sermons. I always tell them that I don’t start with the answer but with a question, and the process of writing the sermon is the process by which I find the answer, if there is one. The surprising answer I have found at the end of this sermon is that while I have a few mistakes I wish I’d made, I mostly have a lot of mistakes I’m glad I didn’t make - mistakes of not risking mistakes. Things might have worked out badly, that is the nature of risk, but mostly they didn’t. And taking those risks with my livelihood, my understandings, my life’s path, have resulted in giving me the firmest foundation I can imagine for whatever is coming next.

Two nights ago I was dining out with a Unitarian Universalist colleague and some friends. As we went into the restaurant, the colleague bumped into a parishioner of his. He stopped and introduced us all to her. When he introduced me to her, she said, gratifyingly - and seriously: “ THE Liz Lerner?” I, surprised and a little embarrassed in front of the group we were with, said “Excuse me?” She said again “THE Liz Lerner?” I thought - ‘wow, I guess Silver Spring is doing even better than I knew,’ and said, “Well, I guess so.” She said: “Liz Lerner, the dancer?”

Some of you may know there’s a well-known dancer with a well-respected company in the DC area who has the same name as me. Everyone laughed. I laughed too. It’s good to get taken down a notch - if we’ve got the room to get taken down at all, it’s generally a blessing - good for you like spinach or a diet or walking in a downpour until you don’t mind it anymore.

Had life been different, I could’ve been ‘the Liz Lerner, the dancer.’ Who knows where that back-up dancer gig might have led? But I made my choice, and my choice has made me happy. Not the dancer with her own remarkable company, the minister with a remarkable church. A woman with a life that makes a lot of sense to her. A woman who has lived long enough that she finally knows where she wants to go from here.

There’s a piece of conventional wisdom that says a subtle Eastern curse is to wish that a person might live in interesting times. Risks aren’t always easy choices. They don’t always yield what we wish. But I realize I have few mistakes I wish I’d made, and many risks I’m glad I took, even the ones that didn’t work out. We each have to find our own balance, how to make choices that are courageous but not foolish, constructive but not banal, challenging but not dreadful - at least not the choices we have to power to select for ourselves. We are living now in interesting times - may that be to us a blessing and not a curse. We are taking risks as individuals and as a congregation in many ways - raising our pledges, deepening our commitment, reaching out to those with different faiths and histories to better understand each other and help us to live together. May we use the tension and awareness around us in these interesting times to better live and to better life for all. May none of us have many mistakes we wish we made.

Amen.