No matter who we are, we’re always in a state of change–and so is our congregation! Come explore the wisdom of transition and transformation with us as we celebrate ourselves as works in progress.

Reverend Molly’s message:

If someone had told me while I was still in college that one day I’d be standing in front of all of you giving a sermon about how maybe the process of doing something is every bit as good and important as the end result, I think laughter would have been the nicest reaction my much-younger self could muster. 

By now, a lot of you know that back before I discovered my passion for Unitarian Universalism and for ministry, I was an artist. (And if you didn’t already know, surprise!) More specifically, I was an illustrator. I wanted to illustrate children’s books of fairy tales and mythology, draw fantasy book covers, maybe even dip into comics and animation. I went to art school, got a degree, and everything. I was full-on dedicated to my craft and to getting better at what I wanted to do. So it might sound a little strange to hear me say that at that time, I had very little regard or respect for the artistic process, except as a means to the inevitable end of making something finished. 

But really, if you think about it, this follows logically. In the world of the art that I really idolized–paintings that existed on museum walls, printed on pages and distributed to booksellers, movies you could see projected on a huge screen–what you saw was the end result. 

When you watch an animated movie put out by Disney or Pixar, you don’t see the rejected concept art that led to the thoughtfully designed characters you see on screen, or the color studies for sequences and scenes that the animators wanted to include, but couldn’t.

When you look at a book cover, you see something meticulously designed and rendered. Any hints of the hand of the artist at work–rough brushstrokes or stray pencil marks–are a deliberate choice in a world where anything we make can be easily edited. You don’t see the rough thumbnail sketches and preparatory drawings that the illustrator considered before deciding on the format of the final work.

And if the art you’re looking at in a museum is from a Eurocentric tradition and dated prior to the 20th century, you’re most likely seeing the version that’s not only as close to perfect as the artist could achieve, but perhaps also that the portrait sitter or the artist’s patron or the commissioner of the work–someone with power and money–thought was close to perfect as well. Unless that artist’s sketches survive or the painting itself is x-rayed and previous versions revealed, you are only seeing the “peak” version of that idea, that piece of art.

Now, it isn’t difficult to find examples of many artists’ unfinished works, works in progress, or concept sketches that never “made the cut” for the final products. But at the time I was in college, my bias was for the things that do look polished and perfect. I was often deliberately over-valuing the end result and under-valuing the process that led there. But if we live under late capitalism and make our living in a creative field, the thing we learn to prize as the worthy goal is the thing that results in us getting paid. The works in progress stay in the sketchbook, seldom seen unless we go out of our way to share them. Before we have something complete, everything from the sketch to color layering to refining is just the messy, imperfect steps to get us to where we really intended to go all along. 

I never wanted anyone to see the work I felt wasn’t finished to my satisfaction. Everything that stayed in my sketchbook, never finished or seeing the light of day, felt like a shameful mistake I needed to hide. Badly rendered anatomy, stiff gesture drawings, unconvincing expressions–all of it was evidence of my failures to see things accurately, to translate them properly, to communicate what I wanted to. If we’re stuck in this mentality, as I was and as many people are, it becomes a lot harder to see the value in anything left undone or abandoned. Anything that’s still in progress, still growing, still unfolding. Anything that we’re still learning.

This is a mindset that exists in so many other fields, not just the arts. We’re constantly looking for definite conclusions, bottom lines, and final outcomes. When this is all we see, all that’s ascribed merit or worth, and all that’s held up in our professional lives as something to emulate, we learn to value the finish: the end result, the final product. 

It doesn’t leave a lot of room for the messiness, the unfinishedness, the sketched edges and rough color blobs that most of us know is the stuff of real life.

How many projects have you started, and then abandoned when it became clear they wouldn’t lead to the end result you imagined?

How might you feel about the idea of someone looking at and reading your rough drafts or dissertations in progress, looking through your sketchbooks, learning from the dead ends you found and the mistakes you made along the way?

We might all have different answers for these questions, but these are precisely the sorts of things that process theology forces us to think about and consider. 

Process theology emerged in the mid-20th century as a response and expansion to English mathematician Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. Whitehead’s philosophical work imagines life, the universe, reality, God–all things which our language treats as static nouns–as unfolding creative processes. These processes are the result of endless combinations of collaboration, and we are constantly co-creating the shape of life, the universe, and everything. Process theologians would take Whitehead’s work and build on it, framing us as co-creators with God: partners in the endeavor of creation, destruction, and definition.

If this all sounds like it’s getting a little distant and airy-fairy, let me bring it back down to earth for us: process theology was a radical re-imagining of what God can mean as a concept. Not a being; not some separate arbiter of right and wrong; not an omniscient or omnipotent creator. In this framework, God is an artist in the same sense that any human being is an artist: God is observer and witness, mirror and driving force. God is not a “man with a plan,” in any sense; God is the direction of change itself. 

And if you’re thinking “but wait–it’s not just some mysterious force we might call God at work here, we shape how things change too,” yes! You’re absolutely right! In process theology, all things are both undergoing the process of change themselves; and also directing the process of change. Black American speculative fiction author Octavia Butler said this more elegantly and clearly in one of her novels than any other description of process theology I’ve ever seen. She wrote, “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is Change.”

In other words, it’s the process of creating, of transforming and transition, that makes up life; not the end results or the products. None of us will ever be finished “products,” framed on a museum wall or presented to future investors or marketed for mass consumption.

Right now, our world is undergoing seismic changes. Society’s values are shifting as it becomes clear that our old ways of doing things are failing us. More of us across class and across intersections of power and privilege are beginning to notice that eternal growth and profit is impossible. That the interests of corporations and the ruling class are extracting our labor and colonizing our imaginations. And we are beginning to shape change in response to those realizations. 

As the world changes, it changes us; and all that we touch will change as we do. 

At the start of the Covid pandemic, there were a number of think pieces that came out about how right in front of us was the potential to dismantle what wasn’t working–to choose to care for one another instead of striking out individually and letting everyone fend for themself. To recognize the unsustainability of a for-profit healthcare infrastructure and turn to something more equitable. To notice the outsize impact of a few massive companies on global carbon emissions and begin regulating at the source of the problem, rather than passing the responsibility on to individuals whose comparative impact is already low.

By and large, systems of power rejected these choices, reverting instead to what was familiar and tried. But many of us learned lessons during this time that are right now moving us through the trauma, away from calcified thinking about the way things must be done. We’ve learned to leverage our trust in others, and their trust in us, to try new things and live into new ways of being human. We’re trying on new labels, new roles, and new ways of being in relationship. We are setting down burdens that never belonged to us in the first place, and picking up work that feeds us. We’re letting ourselves be seen–in all our rough edges and unfinished mess–not for who we were once, but for who we can become. 

And we–we messy works in progress, still being painted, still being written, still becoming what we might one day be–touch what’s out there, in the world.

We change it.

I’ll still always have the desire to see work finished–as complete as possible to what I originally envisioned. It’s part of having images in my head that are very firmly finished and which have a definite look. Now that I understand my earlier process-phobia as a product of my own insecurity, I have a much healthier relationship to both sides of the creative process and I feel no need to try and change the want to see things done, and done well. If you’re oriented toward completeness too, I hope you don’t feel like you have to change your mind. 

But if you feel that same sense of insecurity about your mistakes, your sketchy lines, and your unfinished places that I used to, it’s still possible to learn to trust the process, not just to look for the end product.

As we go; as we change; as recognize ourselves in an ever-unfolding state of transition and we turn our inner sense toward our co-creators both seen and unseen, who have been with us from the beginning and will witness us through to the end, let us keep faith that the story of the world’s healing is still being written. 

That we are both creator and created.

That process is progress, and that the work is never finished.

Blessed be and amen.