“The Decisive Moment”

Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris

January 6, 2008 

Because it is a new year, I’m going to ask that we engage our collective imaginations this morning.  In the world we live in, the virtual can be realer than the real, so we’re going to pretend we have one of those trendy contemporary sanctuaries where they put the hymns up in PowerPoint and use graphics and such.  And so, I can snap a little button on my remote here and you see here on our screen, the image with which I wish to start this sermon.  As you can see, being the creative and imaginative people you are, the picture here is black and white and it shows a busy street on a typical busy day in a European city of fifty years ago.  In the background is a wall and a sign and a high wrought-iron fence and behind that we get a quick impression of a weathered building, a shadowy passing figure, a building with a peaked roof, maybe a train station.  All of this we take in quickly because what captures our attention is that part, in the far right corner there—a man, in a hat and heavy clothing, jumping across a puddle.  The photograph has captured him in mid-jump, suspended in the air above the puddle, just about to put that foot down, the heel only half an inch from the flawless surface of the puddle.  

A photograph taken a moment before would have shown the man poising to leap; one taken a moment later would show the splashdown.  What is so striking is the way this photograph captures the tension between that particular choice of action and its connection to a whole chain of actions before it and after it.  And it is that tension I want us to explore.   

This photograph we are seeing and not seeing together this morning is a rather famous one, a picture by renown French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson.  His book, The Decisive Moment, is considered one of the most important photography books of the 20^th century.¹ I remember studying it in college as a photojournalism student, amazed at the immediacy Cartier-Bresson was able to capture, especially because he did it by waiting and watching.  I was of the generation that was just discovering the super fast motor drives that were to photography what machine guns were to weaponry—mash your finger down on a button and you could hardly miss what you were shooting because the camera shot dozens of frames per minute.  Cartier-Bresson did not shoot with a motor drive.  He cradled a Leica in his hands and he paid attention.  His work captured the extraordinary in the mundane—and he called his book, “the Decisive Moment.”  As we gather here for the first time in this New Year, it is a good time to think about the decisive moments we have faced and will face and what it is we need to do to be sure we are paying attention.     

Whatever they are, they will come and go before we know it.  The way, well, 2007 did, for example.  Cartier-Bresson defined the “decisive moment” this way:  "the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." 

Recognizing an event’s significance is tricky in itself.  We all have moments and this is your chance to put your own particular snapshot into our virtual slideshow, significant moments from your life.  Perhaps it is the once-in-a-blue-moon chance we get to talk to our teenager or adult child, or to our parent and to truly say the things that need to say.  Perhaps it is the quality of attention we give to everyday moments we have with our children, our spouses, our partners, our friends.  Perhaps it is the instant when we say no to some person in our life trying to make us act in a way out-of-sync with our deepest values.  Perhaps how we say yes to an opportunity that is also a risk.  Perhaps how we greet the news of an illness or prepare those who love us to face our death.  Perhaps it is a decisive moment in our collective lives, the way we prepare to respond as a congregation, community, state or nation. 

Okay, so significant events abound, but what does he mean by the “precise organization of forms”? While, at one level, Cartier-Bresson might have been talking about the elements in the composition of his photograph and how they relate, we can take this to the metaphorical level and think about it in terms of our lives.  What are the parts, the forms, in our lives that allow us to meet the decisive moments we face in ways which we will consider “proper expression”? 

Perhaps the precise organization of forms begins with our grounding in sustaining truths larger than ourselves, the forms of great circles.  In his 1850 sermon preached against the Fugitive Slave Act, the great Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker spoke about that deeper grounding which overrides the circumstances of life.  He calls this “natural duty” and he contrasts it to the “official business” that our roles in life give us:

Let it be remembered that I am a man first of all, and all else that I am is but a modification of my manhood, which makes me a clergyman, a fisherman, or a statesman; but the clergy, the fish, and the State are not to strip me of my manhood. They are valuable insofar as they serve my manhood, not as it serves them. My official business as clergyman, fisherman, or statesman is always beneath my personal duty as man. In case of any conflict between the two, the natural duty ought to prevail and carry the day before the official business; for the natural duty represents the permanent law of God, the absolute right, justice, the balance-point of all interests; while the official business represents only the transient conventions of men, some partial interest; and besides the man who owes the personal duty, is immortal, while the officer who performs the official business, is but for a time. …This is the great circle, drawn by God, and discovered by conscience, which girdles my sphere, including all the smaller circles, and itself included by none of them.²

Maybe Parker’s “great circle” is one of those forms that organize our lives.  And for those of you who find no meaning for you in the word, God, I would suggest that the great circle can be the circle of human community.  When I was a twenty-something, just becoming part of my first Unitarian Universalist congregation, I was struck by how much life was captured within the circle of that congregation.  People were born and people were in transition, changed jobs, homes and partners, people were fighting illnesses and addictions, people were dying.  I remember one Sunday being struck by it all—what author and meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn would call the “full catastrophe” of life and how fortunate I was to be a fellow traveler with so many others, to learn from their travels and truths, to have them to offer counsel in mine. 

The great circle connects us beyond our life, and yet so many of the other forms are the small dots of reality that form the lines and squares and triangles in the mosaic of our lives.  Some of the shapes are small and intricate and others are huge—yet all of them are just compilations of the dots we make day to day.  We learn again and again that it is not the big events or the dramatic events that shape us as much as it is the chain of smaller and more mundane events –as Lao-Tse’s words reminded us—these shape our ability to respond to the greater challenges life presents.  The truth is that these moments are all linked to the moments that come before them. 

All of these forms are with us in the entirety of the choices we face.  In the story of David and Goliath, we might think David’s decisive moment comes when he strikes Goliath and is declared the victor.  Or is it when he decides that what Goliath is doing is wrong and when he chooses to confront him?  The organization of the forms of his life occurs in ordinary daily activities—walking over the stones which are in his path each day, becoming acquainted with the stick that becomes an extension of himself, being a care-taker, of sheep and of people.  And the decisive moment, is it the moment when your foot hits the puddle—splash!—or is it the moment when you decide to jump or is it all those other moments when you are training yourself to jump.    Is it the moment when you, the photographer, press the button or all the moments you train yourself to wait before pressing?

Here is another image, this one of Julia Butterfly Hill, an activist who lived on top of a redwood tree for 738 days to prevent the Pacific Lumber Company from cutting it down.  Doesn’t she look young?  Vulnerable?   She wrote in 2001 “we still need to care and to do that we need truth and inspiration, information and hope—that gives us the tools to take conscious actions towards positive change.” 

Hill made a sudden and dramatic decision that got her praised as a prophet and condemned as a kook—we all make many small decisions that also affect the interdependent world in which we live, we all choose what roads we walk down.   “Proper expression,” as Cartier-Bresson put it, in our world today might mean acting as though there is still a shortage when they lift the drought sanctions in our town since the truth is our world faces an on-going water shortage.  Or making choices to conserve energy because no matter how we feel about war, few of us believe that lives should be lost to preserve our high-consumption life styles.  Or on the local level, finding the time to add voice to our IMPACT effort, speaking for those who have gone unheard for too long. 

The way we meet the moments of our lives depends on the ways we prepare to meet them.  As 2007 passed, we said good bye to a year in which this community was touched with much loss.  We said good bye to so many people whom we loved, and I have to say what a privilege it was to witness the larger circles drawn around those who died in our midst last year.  These people we loved who had less time with us than we hoped remind us of the opportunity each new day of life is.  

Jon Kabat-Zinn is founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.  He gives people tools to organize the forms in their lives, to ready them for their decisive moments.  A Zen student, Kabat-Zinn was compelled to bring Zen teachings into the hospitals, he saw as so full of suffering.  He did this because he knew this suffering, like the great joys of life is real and immediate and that we need to be present to it.  Kabat-Zinn’s modest goal with his patients is that in moments of great pain or fear, people know how to return to their breath.  He is not promising to take pain and difficulty away from those he works with, he is helping them be present to the moments before them, more able to grasp those moments of decision. 

Still, paying attention takes effort, as Kabat-Zinn tells the people with whom he works.  “We're very up front,” he writes. “We explain that in order to get the benefits of the stress reduction program you've got to make one hell of a commitment to yourself….We tell them right away that it's stressful to take the stress reduction program! If you want to accomplish something, a certain amount of energy and work is required.”

In one of his books, Kabat-Zinn writes about a New Yorker cartoon—I am going to put it up on our imaginary screen.  Picture two Zen monks in robes with shaved heads sitting cross-legged on the floor.  The younger one has a slightly puzzled expression and the older one is saying, “Nothing happens next.  This is it.” 

This is it.  So I’m going to click back a few images, to the real ones you all inserted from your own lives and then I’m going to turn off our virtual images.  In a world where we live our lives in that rapid fire, motor-drive multi-image ways, we need places and practices to recall us to those most important forms and remind us how we wish to organize them in relation to our greatest circles.  In the context of our real lives, when you come right down to it, all moments are decisive moments.  Every moment of this life is a precious opportunity. 

As we enter this new year, together we can remind ourselves to breathe, to be conscience of all we are given, to be filled with loving kindness and remember that we are part of greater circles.  May our prayer for this house be a recommitment to this circle here, a place where we take a collective breath and remind ourselves to pay attention.    Let’s make this our decisive moment and this our decisive moment and this and this.  Because nothing happens next.  This is it. 

So may it be.

Benediction 

Words of R. D. Laing, psychiatrist/philosopher

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.