The Necessity of Discomfort
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Recently, in preparation for my daily practice of mindfulness and prayer, I came across a stunning piece of information. In The Book of Awakening; Having the Life You Want to Have by Being Present to the Life You Have, by the poet Mark Nepo, I learned that a baby chick doesn’t just hatch. Well, it does hatch, but the process of hatching is actually a terrifying event if you look at it from the bird’s perspective.
In the moments before birth the small hatchling has eaten all its food, and its growing body presses against every contour and curve of the shell. There is no more room. There is no more food. The chick hatches because its body is painfully cramped inside the world of the egg, and it is starving.
There is so much discomfort that the chick is driven to peck its way into whatever is on the other side of the world, whatever is on the other side of safety, because there is nothing else to do and still survive. The world literally breaks apart. The chick eats bits of its own shell, and its body squeezes through the emerging cracks.
Hatching is not graceful. There is wrestling and rolling around. There is crying and prying. There is exhaustion, and power naps. There is stumbling and trying to hold the head up while getting feet underneath the body. Hatching is not graceful. It is beautiful to behold, but I daresay the chick would not describe it that way. I think the chick would say: hatching is necessity. As Mark Nepo writes: “Once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn’t die, but falls into the world.”
I think most of us can name a time when where we were, what we were doing, how we were being, was so uncomfortable, so constraining, that there was nothing to be done but peck a way into whatever was on the other side of the egg we have relied on, whatever was on the other side of safety, because there was no other way we were going to survive. It might have felt like death, but instead, each of us fell into a new world. Whether we like it or not, discomfort—feeling cramped, feeling soul-hungry—is the seed of transformation.
My psychologist friend Dr. Donna DiMenna says, “Everything changes. Change…change…change, yes change happens and we celebrate and mark this fact of living, as well we should. But change is not transformation.” Change, she says, is an occurrence that happens in the context of our own worldview, our eggshell, if you will.
Transformation, however, is change that extends beyond the boundaries of our worldview. There is no way the hatchling can imagine what is on the other side of the egg. It is discomfort that drives the chick to risk everything, to go beyond its worldview. This is transformation.
So let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean.
I have fond memories of visiting my uncle’s farm in Nebraska when I was younger. It was paradise. I loved my cousins. I loved the farm. Looking back, it was a time when I felt absolutely free and absolutely loved.
But as the years wore on and life began to shape us all, I realized that I had stopped connecting with my relatives. There was this growing divide between us, as wide as the canyon by the farm where we used to play as kids. My uncle, aunt and cousins belonged to a very conservative Christian church. I remember being surprised by some of the things they would say about God, about non-believers, about people of color, about homosexuals. What they said didn’t seem to match up with this big experience of love I felt. I couldn’t deal with the cognitive dissonance as a kid, so I set it aside.
Then as fate would have it, I became involved with my partner. I stayed as far away from the subject of my own family as I possibly could. I attended funerals and weddings without my partner, Rebecca, knowing it would be too uncomfortable. And then, finally, I just stopped going altogether.
That egg was getting mighty uncomfortable. My spirit was painfully cramped inside the shell of ideas about family and religion, narratives about who is normal and who is not, and I was starving. I was starving for the love I once felt and that deep sense of family. I was starving to have my full humanity, my whole and holy self.
There was nothing else to do but what I did. I decided it was time to connect. I invited my whole family to a concert I was singing in. My cousins arrived in Omaha with their kids, and my aunt in tow. They listened to the concert, beaming the whole way through. I was glad I was singing, because I knew everything we had relied on up to that point for family connection—my silence, my acquiescence to definitions of family, to what is “normal,” understandings of religion—all of it would soon break apart…and we would fall into another world. I couldn’t guess what was on the other side. All I knew was that the current world was coming to an end.
Now, I wasn’t stupid. I knew who I needed to talk to first. I wasn’t going to make a big announcement at the dinner table. I wanted to take my cousin Debbie off to the side, and speak with her alone. My cousins and aunt drove me to my hotel and when I stepped out of the car, and my cousin Debbie asked: “Do you need help with your luggage?” “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I definitely need help.” (I had one bag.)
I knew it was now or never. With the engine idling and my aunt and cousins in the car nearby, I said something like:
“Look, I’ve been trying to tell you something all night, but I haven’t had the chance. I wish I could do this differently, but this is what I’ve got to do, right here, right now. I am partnered with…uh… I mean, I am living with.… Let me start over. I am, like, married to a woman. We’ve been together for a really long time. I know this may not agree with your religious views, but I’m hoping to be reconnected with you and with the family, and I don’t know how to do that without telling you about who I really am.”
The evening could have gone a thousand different ways; I’d heard plenty of stories. But grace intervened that night. Debbie took my hand and smiled with such tenderness. “I don’t care. I love you…. What’s your partner’s name?”
When you watch a chick being hatched there seems to be this one pivotal break that allows the rest of the process to transpire. There’s a lot of rolling around with the egg still attached to the chick. There’s a lot of flopping around, trying to hold its head up, trying to comprehend wings outstretched instead of wings closed around the torso.
So much of this was true for me and my family. There was and still is plenty of flopping around, shells of religious doctrine and narratives about what is “normal” half attached to our bodies, to our conversations. But the real transformation in all this is not me coming out. That was just the pivotal crack.
The real transformation is a shift in our family culture. It has something to do with bringing our full humanity, our whole and holy selves to one another. Concepts of family, and of what it is to be together, are shifting. My cousin’s kids want to gather with me and my sisters whenever we come down to Nebraska, because they sense that something real and authentic is happening. We see each other.
In the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, I can’t help but think of my new understanding of hatching.
This egg we’re all living in is getting mighty tight: this egg of racism and white privilege, this social construct that was made up centuries ago and that we are living out to devastating effect today. The construct, the egg, says white skin, white ways of looking at things, white ways of doing things are normal, are fully human. Other expressions of skin tone, culture, and ways of viewing the world are somehow a little less, justifying all manner and forms of inequity.
As I heard so powerfully at a vigil for Michael Brown and other dark skinned youth who have recently lost their lives: “Racism is not the stupid remark your great uncle makes and causes everyone to squirm around the dinner table.” “Racism is the air we breathe,” as Dr. Heather Hackman puts it. It is a construct in which we all live, that weaves its way through economics, policing, education, and everyday life, like walking down the middle of the street one afternoon, and ending up being shot to death.
Or in north Minneapolis, recently, when a young black woman crossing the street in the crosswalk to attend that same vigil was startled by a cop car that had to slow down for her, as they tried to respond to a 911 call. The young woman didn’t even understand what she had done when six police cars pulled up after the vigil and bundled her into the back seat of the squad car, detaining and ticketing her for obstruction. I have to ask myself, “Would this have happened in my neighborhood or if that young woman looked like me, a middle-aged white woman?” I don’t think so.
Friends, we are all in this egg, this racialized egg. We didn’t construct it. We’re just in it together, some to life–stressing, life-threatening disadvantage, and others to life–enhancing advantage. But regardless of where we are positioned in the egg, we are all starving.
Changes or adjustments inside the worldview of the egg are not enough. There is so much needless death, so much dissonance, so much disorder and disarray, so much discomfort that we are being driven to peck our way into whatever is on the other side of the world, because there is nothing else to do and still survive.
Transformation is what we are longing for: change that is beyond our worldview, beyond the walls of the egg. This pecking and prying, this wrestling and rolling around—this is what’s necessary.
This is what it means to live into our principles of inherent worth and dignity of every person, what it means to work for justice, equity and compassion in human relations. This is what it means to live into shalom, a peace that is born out of right relationship to one another, to ourselves, and to the great and moving spirit of good and grace that I sometimes call God.
Friends, there is no more room. But take heart. Trust the discomfort. Trust the anger. Trust the tenderness. It is all a part of hatching. It is all a piece of transformation.
May we peck and pry until we are born whole and holy in the new world.
As a minister, Ruth proudly serves First Universalist Church of Minneapolis as Minister of Pastoral Care and Worship Architecture. She received a Master of Divinity degree in 2011 from United Theological Seminary in New Brighton and was ordained into the Unitarian Universalist ministry by First Universalist Church. Ruth characterizes her vocation in this way: “I once was a minister in artistry. Now I’m an artist in ministry.”
You can hear some of Ruth’s singing on Spotify: Ruth MacKenzie, Love Like Thathttps://open.spotify.com/artist/27D5KXnwLPpomUDcbsGzkE#_=_
- The Wisdom Of Trees - October 1, 2019
- The Necessity of Discomfort - January 1, 2015
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