Fall Back Plans
Last night, if we were on top of things, we set our clocks back an hour. And you’re here, on time, so I guess you were on top of things. Or you’ve been here waiting for an hour. Or, if you’re like me, you put a little sticky note on every flashing blue clock in your home as a reminder that you haven’t changed it yet and the time is not to be trusted. Thank goodness for phones and laptops and other Hal-like devices that changed themselves!
Before we had those convenient and just a bit scary devices, we used ‘fall back; spring forward’ as a reminder about what to do with our clocks when the appointed night arrived twice a year. Fall back is a phrase we use in other life situations, too. And they interest me.
At this time of year I think of people falling back into huge piles of raked, dried and colorful leaves. And that in turn reminds me of Nestea Iced Tea commercials of 30 or 40 years ago in which tea drinkers overwhelmed with refreshment fall backward into a swimming pool. And I think of the team building trust fall exercise that calls for one participant to free fall backward into the arms of a coworker, trusting they will be caught before crashing to the ground. Campaigns, military and political, have fallback plans. So do organizations and businesses that do strategic, long range planning–Plan Bs, alternative strategies in case the first one or two or half dozen don’t work out. It’s a sign of leadership and good management
Because Tuesday is election day I’m also thinking back to about this time two years ago when some residents of our country announced their fall back plan of moving to Canada if their candidate didn’t win the presidency, and others announced their fall back plan of moving to Hungary or perhaps Brazil if their candidate didn’t win the presidency. In the end, of course, a different, deadly fall back plan unfolded and the repercussions are unfolding still.
The fall back plans that interest me the most, however, are more substantial than falling into leaf piles or swimming pools. Less reactionary than abandoning one’s country. Of greater lasting impact than a team-building trust fall. And more personal consequence than organizational plans. I grew up with a story that my grandfather insisted that my mother and her older sister attend and graduate from college, prepared for a career, able to support themselves, even if they followed the path of the late 1950s that mostly took women into early marriages where the husband was expected to support the family. That’s an example of a fallback plan that can shape the course of a life.
One of the most popular sermons I preached in my first congregation in South Bend Indiana was titled When the Future Changes. It should’ve been titled simply The Future Changes because we can never predict the future, from one day to the next; the future is always changing even as the present is unwinding. The future changes with the outcome of elections at every level of local, state, national government. The future changes with severe weather events and wildfires–all more common and more unpredictable with the increasing pace of global climate change. It changes with the beginning and evolution and ending of relationships. With armed conflicts and pandemics and supply chain disruptions. With changes to our health and physical abilities over our life-cycles. The future changes continually.
Knowing that life will surprise us, upsetting our most well-laid initial plans, it’s good to have fallback plans, and rainy day accounts, and a certain ability to hold lightly to outcomes. Still, I think, whether by dint of denial or the distractions of everyday living, most of us don’t have a file full of well conceived and regularly updated fallback plans. If we reach late middle age we might start thinking about moving into a home that’s all on one level with wide doorways for accessibility. And if we’re lucky, we save for retirement when our financial status will change. But I feel safe in saying most of us don’t have a fallback plan for when the marriage we’re just entering into ends before death does us part. We don’t have a fallback plan for the birth of a child who may have 10 little fingers and 10 little toes but also has some hidden characteristics that convention tells us are not the mental or intellectual or cardiac or endocrine equivalent of the perfection of ten little fingers and ten little toes. But these two instances and hundreds more are times when we will fall, and pray that it will be a falling back and punting, or falling back and regrouping. Not a falling back and crash landing.
This season, about halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere, when the light is changing and animals are migrating, in this season I wonder what we fall back upon in when the future changes. When we haven’t made formal fall back plans, when we couldn’t possibly have done so because we didn’t know any of what was to come, what catches us? What keeps us from landing with such a crash that we are all but destroyed and no one, not even all the sovereign’s horses and followers can put us together again.
We’re going to watch the video now that I recommended you watch at home on your computer or mobile device ahead of time so that you could get the full clarity of the video and the audio better than what you’ll get here on the wall. Please watch closely and take note of what steps the dancer’s feet are on when he falls and what step his feet land on when he pops pack up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_DA3dgRSrw
Did you notice it? In the first half of the video the dancer falls sideways off the stair, onto the trampoline and pops back up to just one step lower than the stairs he was on when he fell, and then he goes up two more steps, falls off and pops back up just one step lower. What’s the proverbial path of change or hard work? Two steps forward, one step back. Repeat.
A physicist could explain to us exactly why that happens in this visual representation of two steps up and one step back. Could explain about momentum and inertia and loss of energy.
But to me this dance is so much more than physics. Because it is a dance and because when the dancer falls back something catches him and propels him, and that’s what captivates me, not a physicist but a theologian, in this season of change and this month of exploring the path of change. The dancer is not alone on his path of change, on his journey to the top of the staircase. Something, some force, some presence is there with him, ready to catch him, help absorb the excess and potentially harmful energy, and send him forth on his path again.
What catches us when we must fall back? What keeps us from falling was such a crash? What keeps propelling us forward through life, even if, at times, it’s one step farther back than we were before we fell or were waylaid or changed direction, or everything changed around us? What propels us gracefully back onto the path?
There are perhaps as many answers as there are people who might ask the question. Is that trampoline God? The holy web of all existence? Our network of family and friends? Our lived experiences, and our prior failures and successes? I can’t know what that trampoline is for you. It might be your meditation practice or daily walk or regular trips to the shore or mountains. It might be your participation in a support group or singing in a choir or gardening or sewing or running or volunteerism.
Or is it this church or another community that is always ready to catch you safely, gently, firmly, and give you the momentum you need to land back just one step behind where you were, ready again to take two more steps. And ready eventually to dance, free form, in the delight of your being and your interaction with and relationship to Creation.
No matter what brings us to church in the first place, or keeps us coming back—a search for meaning, a longing for community, a desire to give back to society— no matter why we come to church, if we’re doing it mostly right, you and I and the committees and groups here, what we will find at church is a trampoline, a net, a weaving together of arms and hearts that catch us when we fall. That will bounce us back to our feet and our path even when everything changes around us. That will get us back on our path and eventually off anything that looks like a path and into a dance of unfettered life—never without tumbles and always with rebounds and
Likewise, no matter why we bring our kids to church even when they don’t want to come, even when they whine and complain and fidget in the pew, and we’re tired of fighting with them, if they are here, regularly, and we’re doing it mostly right—providing caring, competent RE staff, and age appropriate activities, and calling them by name and smiling at them and being interested their lives and sharing bits of our lives—no matter why we bring to church, this can and will in ways we may never clearly know, be the trampoline that catches them and hold them and send them bouncing back into their lives.
There is of course one huge significant difference between the dancer's trampoline and whatever it is that catches us and will not let us fall, and propels us back into our lives: the dancer or his assistants carefully determined the optimal placement of that trampoline in advance. There could be accidents and mishaps but mostly he knows the trampoline is where it should be and he can depend on it to catch him. Most of our webs and networks and sources of safety and momentum are more ephemeral. We don’t get them set up in advance of ever needing them and just depend that they’ll be there from then on out. We mostly have to build them and we mostly have to continue building them, through practice and repetition and relationship building. We have to do the meditation practice day in and week out over the years. We have to take the walks when we feel like it and when we don’t . We have to show up at church bringing our hearts and our willingness to participate, week after week. If the shore is what catches us we need to build shore time into our lives. And so on.
Having a fall back plan for when life changes, one that will hold us and let us go only into the holy arc of becoming ourselves, again and again, takes time and attention, effort and practice. But, oh, the glory when we fall, as we inevitably will, and yet soar into our life’s dance again. Amen.