Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House

My children had lovely first words, Mum of course, a cat noise, my younger daughter just said ‘yeah’ to everything…until she learnt the word ‘no’ of course.

But my first word was more and apparently, I used this abundantly in all situations. More of everything please! I’m still like that!

And I wonder if wanting more is something very real and human that often lies quietly underneath much of our everyday lives. I wonder if humming away in the background, there is quite often something that asks, a little anxiously, do I have enough? Do I do enough? Am I enough?

We ran out of petrol in Framlingham yesterday. Really – there was a run on the petrol station because someone posted on Facebook that fuel was running low… and we all went out and got fuel, all knowing that our journey was the most important…all knowing that everyone else was panic buying fuel whereas we were the one who really needed it.

 And actually, honestly, I think that’s fine and natural and linked to wanting to feel safe and secure. I don’t know about you though but for me it can collapse into a kind of excess of striving…

The world seems to answer the question – am I enough? – with a steady stream of expectations. Do more. Try harder. Improve yourself. Achieve a little more. Be a little better. Buy more. Have more. People talk about upgrades now, you don’t just upgrade your phone contract, you upgrade your furniture, your body, your life.

My elder daughter is currently practicing for her violin exam… and it’s hard to watch a tiny version of myself striving for perfection… never quite feeling like she’s got there – there is always a squeak or a misplaced note… I’m sure you know what beginner violinists sound like. It’s hard to convince her that she’s good enough and that good enough is fine… it’s hard because I’ve embodied that sense of striving for more all my life too…

Maybe this resonates – it’s not hard to begin to feel that life is a kind of exam we are perpetually sitting – one where the passing grade is always just slightly out of reach.

***

It’s International Women’s Day and it’s Lent and so it feels fitting to centre our reflections around stories of women – women whose spiritual encounters reveal something profound about dignity, belonging, and the quiet discovery that they have enough and are enough. For is that not also the message of Lent at it’s most gentle, that we do not have to consume more than we need or indeed less, that what we have is enough.  

***

Across traditions and cultures, we hear stories of women standing at moments of quiet significance – moments where something simple opens into wisdom.

In the gospel story we heard earlier, a woman comes to a well in the heat of the day.

She comes alone perhaps because life has taught her that she does not quite belong among the others. She’s had five husbands and now lives with someone she isn’t married to maybe she upgraded!!

I hope you felt it when I read it, because I know I did. That ordinary moment, in an ordinary day that is transfigured. She is met with absolute dignity, she is seen and heard. And in that encounter, she begins to glimpse something extraordinary: that the living water, the spiritual nourishment she thought she lacked may never have been scarce after all but lies deep within her and within grace-filled encounters.  

And then she runs off and she leaves the water behind, the very thing she went for, because she has found something else to draw on, something that doesn’t run out and something that doesn’t rely on her being ‘enough.’

***

In another tradition we hear the story of Sujātā – again a village woman whose life placed her far from the centres of religious authority.

She was not a teacher or a philosopher. She was simply someone carrying a bowl of food.

Yet it was her small act of care that helped reveal one of the central insights of Buddhism: that awakening does not come through endless striving or self-denial, but through balance.

Through recognising what is already present and what we are already have is enough.

***

And perhaps that is why poets return again and again to this theme.

Wendell Berry writes about the natural world arriving “wave after wave of foliage and fruit,” and then observes that somehow, even in that abundance, we humans manage to draw “the strenuous outline of enough.”

Some of us live in the midst of extravagance, and still we worry that there is not enough – not enough goodness, not enough worth, not enough belonging.

And perhaps the deepest spiritual work of our lives is slowly learning to trust that the well is already here.

Another poet, Denise Levertov, pushes back against that fear with a simple insistence. She writes:

“Don’t say there is no water…it is still there and always there with its quiet song and strange power.”

We’ll hear her whole poem in a few moments, so listen out for that line alone carries a quiet challenge.

Don’t say there is no water.

Because the deeper wisdom of many traditions seems to whisper the same truth: the well may be closer than we think.

Not a prize to be earned.
Not a reward for perfection.

But something already springing quietly within and among us. This is then living water.

***

Of course, knowing this and believing it are not always the same thing.

We live in cultures – and often inside our own minds – where the voice of “not enough” can be very loud indeed.

And if I’m honest, I must confess something to you.

In preparing this service on the theme of “enough,” I found myself gathering poems, stories, reflections – one after another – until at one point I looked at my desk and thought: perhaps I am demonstrating the human difficulty with “enough” rather better than I intended.

Apparently even sermons about sufficiency can begin to feel slightly… over the top. Remember the baby version of me, demanding “more”.

But perhaps that too is part of the lesson.

Because the deeper truth these stories and poems point toward is not that we must finally achieve some perfect balance.

The deeper truth is simply this:

That even in our imperfect efforts, our halting words, our ordinary lives –

the well is still there.

The water is still flowing.

And the quiet voice that has echoed through so many wisdom traditions is still speaking.

Saying, gently and firmly:

You are enough.

Lizzie Kingston-Harrison