Dust from the Road, Salt from the Sea
I grew up in this church. So you know that you might want to settle in.
This is how it starts:
You wake with the rising of the sun. Or you are fresh home from work. Or, you meant to wake up with the sunrise, but you set your alarm for PM instead of AM and you've just sat bolt-upright in bed with too little time to do everything you need to and too much to excuse giving up and starting again tomorrow. And now the race begins. There are bags still to pack or routes still to plan; the oil in the car needs to be checked or you still need to print your on-line boarding passes. There may be children to wake up, dress and feed, or there may be none. There is trash to take out, last minute dishes to wash, doors and windows to close and double-check, all before you can leave to wherever it is you have to go. It may be just across town or out of the country, but just as soon as you reach that point, cross that invisible line past which you are too far gone to turn back, you will remember that that thing - you know, that thing? That thing that you had to bring with you? That thing that was the whole point of your trip? That thing is still back at the house.
Now, some of you are laughing, I hope, because something about this hypothetical situation seems familiar to you; it has the ring of truth, if not the tone. And some of you may be laughing for exactly the opposite reason: this isn't your life at all. You leave when you want to leave, following your own plan, at your own pace. There are many ways you may have reached this advanced stage. It may be that retirement has been particularly good to you, or you happen to be meticulously organized, or you're just amazingly relaxed about your approach to living. Those of you who find yourselves in this happy category may want to think about sharing your methodology with the rest of the congregation at some point in the near future. Possibly, you could arrange to hold a clinic on the art of travel in the Rhys Williams gallery sometime next month.
But I will venture to guess that, no matter how much grace and ease you may or may not find in literal travels for work and for play, there are parts of the journey of your life, from birth to death, that feel neither so easy nor so graceful. Some days may feel like a space shuttle launch - neatly planned and carefully orchestrated. But others, I'm sure, are more like the Wizard of Oz - dragged from the familiar by bizarre coincidence, out into strange and disorienting territory, full of possibility for change. From moment to moment, from year to year, from milestone to milestone; each point connected by the journey in between.
Today is the ending of one such journey for me. I will spare you the rhetorical pretense of waking up in bed, surrounded by loved ones and declaring "But it wasn't a dream! You were there, and you, and you, and you!" That story is well worn, and I would be too afraid of breaking it. Instead I will say simply that today I have come home. I was raised in this congregation: I played in these halls, I sang from these seats. I came of age here, and I grew into religion here. It was a little bit large for me once, but it fits pretty well now. When I left town to go to college it was a different millennium, and if I am just a little bit tearful this morning, it is only because it is good to be back for a visit.
When I was a member of this congregation's high school youth group, you were either generous enough or foolhardy enough to allow me the privilege of speaking from this pulpit on a few occasions. The first was more than a decade ago. Long, long before that, our Universalist and Unitarian ancestors came to the conclusion that to be together in variety was more sacred than to be apart, or to live in a false and forced sort of sameness. In some of the meeting houses of New England to which we trace our roots, these folks made a sacred practice of sharing their experiences and ideas in pursuit of revelation. Following this example, I took out my copies of the short homilies I had delivered from this spot in years past, looking for something to respond to with the new things I have learned, and with the old things I have forgotten.
That search became an exercise in humility. I found what I was looking for in a homily so ancient and out of date that even the all-seeing, all-knowing internet does not have a copy of it. Nonetheless, I know of it, so here it is: years ago, I spoke here about the importance and value of studying religious stories and traditions. So far, so good. Trying to offer a witty and clever example, I declared that before I began to study such stories for their literary and spiritual value, the most that I could have told you about the story of Job, "was that it had something to do with a whale."
And now I have to do the most unfunny thing in the world: I have to explain the joke - my own experience has taught me not to assume that everyone will get it, because I myself did not. Here is the thing: Job does not have a whale in it. Actually, it sort of does have a whale, but only near the end, and most people don't focus on that part. The big story with a prominent whale in it from the Hebrew Bible is the story of Jonah (again, its actually a prominent fish, but a lot of people imagine it as a whale). I tried to jazz-up my talk about studying religions with a clever remark about a biblical character with a J-name, and got the wrong one, showing that I had a lot further to go still in the study of religion. But, of course, there is always a lot further to go.
Job and Jonah: it was just coincidence - but coincidences are not useless: they can be full of possibilities. Both of those stories are about hard, troubled journeys, and confronting dangerous and harmful ideas. This is the story of Jonah: Jonah is a prophet - someone whose job it is to speak for God. God, conveniently a character in this story, approaches Jonah and askes him to do the sort of thing that prophets do: to go to the city of Nineveh, and warn them to change their wicked ways. But Jonah doesn't do what he's told: he runs in the opposite direction, boards a ship, and tries to get away as quickly as possible. Crisis follows: the ship loses wind and stops dead, the crew throw him overboard, which leads to the infamous fish-swallowing incident. Eventually, things get so bad that Jonah gives up, and does what he was asked: he goes to Nineveh and warns the people to change their ways. The response is sudden, dramatic, and clearly satirical: everyone in Nineveh, not just the humans but the non-human animals as well, fall about themselves in remorse, making immediate and sincere amends for their prior behavior. Jonah is terribly unhappy. The context of the story suggests that he is unhappy because the people of Nineveh are his nation's enemies, and he doesn't want them to repent - he wants them to continue to do wrong and be punished out of existence, as is the way of things in this sort of story. God responds with a short object lesson to show (again with a sarcastic tone) that the thousands of lives in Nineveh are worth caring about. The story of Jonah is an argument against the pursuit of narrow and selfish interest at the expense of both justice and mercy. Jonah's journey is a pattern common to life: there are sometimes lessons we are too stubborn to learn. Even though the opportunity to change crops up again and again we continue to run, even when that stubbornness is a danger to us and to other people. Jonah's story has a relatively happy ending, but things do not always turn out so well.
Meanwhile, in a totally different part of the Bible: The story of Job is generally seen as a story about theodicy - the field of religious philosophy that asks "why do bad things happen to good people?" (Those of you wishing to question and challenge the idea that people can be summed up as essentially good or bad - that sounds like a good conversation to have: I suggest we meet in the Williams Gallery after that clinic on worry-free travel.) The story of Job doesn't actually answer that question though, at least not directly. Instead, it questions and challenges one strangely pervasive and terribly dangerous answer: the idea that everyone gets what they deserve. If something good happens to you, it must be because you are such a good person. If something bad happens to you, you must have done something to deserve it - the worse your fate, the worse the sort of person you must be. Job, a kind, gentle and very comfortable man, loses nearly everything but his life and has an encounter with each of his friends while he is deathly ill, and covered in dust. Each of them provides some variation on the harmful idea that bad things only ever happen to bad people (there's that essential goodness and badness again). Job answers with exactly the sort of anger you'd expect, saying "Your words are just proverbs of ashes and your defenses are made out of clay." When the character of God appears, the focus is on how wrong Job's friends were, and how angry God is about what they said. Job's determination to continue the argument despite his poor health and the badgering of his closest friends follows a pattern that is almost the reverse of Jonah's - his verbal and philosophical journey is something he undertakes against stubborn resistance, in order to challenge ideas in his world that need changing. The story argues against escaping the difficult question of theodicy by denying the reality of injustice and suffering in the world.
So that is Jonah and Job (I will extend to myself a smidgeon of forgiveness for confusing them): the journey you undertake to keep the world from changing you, and the journey you set out on to change the world. The similarity in sound between the word "theodicy" and the Greek myth and epic poem, "The Odyssey" is just another coincidence. And another possibility. And another opportunity for change. The Odyssey is another tale of a strange journey, as the character Odysseus tries for ten years to return home to the city-state of Ithaca (not to be confused with the relatively nearby Ithaca - you know, the one that is Gorges). He fights, escapes and frequently outwits a series of foes and dangers: the cannibal Lestrygonians, the giant Cyclops, the angry sea-god Poseidon, all in the hopes of finally returning home. His is the sort of journey that is completely focused on the destination - perhaps so much so that you cannot find your way out of the journey itself. Constantine Cavafy's poem, "Ithaca," draws inspiration from Odysseus' tale. These are his words:
As you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
Dear friends - and I address you as that, knowing that a few of you, who are not my parents, definitely changed my diapers at some point in the past. For all the journeys you have still in front of you, for those you will make change with, and those that will make change out of you, for the thrill of getting there and the teachings of the spaces in between, I offer you the lessons for spiritual travel that this congregation gave to me: May the promise and complexity of the world set your mind ablaze. May you hold fast to what your life has taught you. May you question everything. And when you have changed the world, and the world has changed you, may you return to this place, and share what you have learned once again.
2006-07 Ministerial Intern, Church of the Larger Fellowship and the Arlington Street Church in Boston
August 5, 2007