Sermon 6.5.16
I get lost all the time.
I’m one of those people who turns into a parking lot, or into a store at the mall, and then later when I leave, I can’t remember from which direction I came.
Before I had a smartphone, when I was living in Boston, I would have to keep MapQuest print-outs in my car even to places I frequented, like Target or the post office.
And when my husband Ethan and I lived in Maine, we would go for long walks with our dogs in the woods behind the house. Thankfully he has an amazing sense of direction! Every once in a while, amid the maze of trees and – to me – unrecognizable series of hills and streams, he would turn back to me and ask, “Do you know where we are?” And each time I would say, “No – absolutely not.” And then he’d point out that our back yard was visible. It’s good sometimes to have a guide.
In her book, Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor recommends the Spiritual Practice of Getting Lost.
She begins by talking about the cow path: the worn, narrow paths traversed by cows to arrive the shortest distance somewhere and avoid steep climbs or risky descents. We all have our own cow paths: for example, the routes we travel in our cars each day: How often have you been intending to stop at the grocery store on your way home from work, but then 10 minutes later end up in your driveway, having just navigated the route home on auto-pilot?
We have many habits of body, mind, and heart. …Set narratives we tell about ourselves and about the world… When’s the last time you pushed yourself off one of these paths? Or got pushed off?
Moving into unfamiliar territory requires us to wake up. …To look around, to not let the worn path make all the choices for us. Of course, we might come across steep hills or sudden drop-offs, but we also might come across fields of flowers, new companions on the journey, new skills, or a different kind of trust.
Barbara Brown Taylor says:
If you do not start choosing to get lost in some fairly low risk ways, then how will you ever manage when one of life’s big winds knocks you clean off your course? I am not speaking literally here, although literal lostness is a good place to begin since the skills are the same: managing your panic, marshaling your resources, taking a good look around to see where you are and what this unexpected development might have to offer you.
I remember driving to my high school graduation ceremony. I went to Trinity here in Midland, and the girls wore white dresses to graduation. I had to arrive early, so I drove there by myself in my step-dad’s rusty red truck. About halfway there, on Andrews Highway near Rosa’s, I looked down and realized I was out of gas. This was one of those trucks with two gas tanks, so, I crossed my fingers and pressed the lever to switch to the other tank.
No luck.
I coasted into a parking lot, and began running down the side of Andrews Highway in my long white dress and high heels in the already hot sun to the nearest gas station. I burst in and blurted out, “I don’t have any money on me, but I ran out of gas down the street.” They told me I could come back and pay later, and an attendant – a very slow attendant – took his time getting my funnel and a full can of gas. I picked them up, one in each hand, and started running back down Andrews Highway in my white dress.
Just as I was trying to figure out how to get the gas into the truck without smelling like fumes for my graduation, some nice men stopped and filled it up for me. I barely made the graduation group photo, but I was there, thanks to the generosity of strangers.
The stories I’ve told so far about getting lost are pretty benign compared to some of the ways we can get lost.
We can intend to be married and end up divorced. We can intend to be a doctor, like our parents imagined, and end up an artist. We can watch our loved ones die. We can experience a disappointment – or a discovery – that makes us question who we are or ever were. We can get sick. We can lose our money, or our job, or our sobriety.
Barbara Brown Taylor says:
Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure. …And yet if someone asked us to pinpoint the times in our lives that changed us for the better, a lot of those times would be wilderness times. When the safety net has split, when the resources are gone, when the way ahead is not clear, the sudden exposure can be both frightening and revealing. … You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.
Now, I know some of you have experienced losses and disappointments I would never wish on anyone…As Barbara Brown Taylor says, you are engaging in the practice of getting lost at an advanced level, and at that level it “has nothing to do with wanting to go there…”
The advanced practice of getting lost consists of consenting to be lost, since you have no other choice. The consenting itself becomes your choice as you explore the possibility that life is for you and not against you, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. (Taylor)
Being lost in the wilderness is a strong theme in the Jewish and Christian holy texts.
The great prophet Jesus, of course, wandered in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, and some may even say he was lost even at the hour of his death, when he shouted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And yet, there are varying ways of interpreting this story –for many kinds of Christian believers and non-believers that show Jesus was not forsaken, was never lost.
Likewise, many centuries before, the Hebrew people leave horrific slavery to wander for 40 years in the desert, with God’s promise before them of a land rich with milk and honey. And yet on the way, they face hunger, illness, and death. … Proving that even in our darkest times we can have a sense of humor, they ask God, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? … For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”
How often we prefer the horrors of the familiar compared to the uncertainty of the unfamiliar!
The Muslim poet Rumi said
Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places?
To the Hebrews the Prophet Moses responds: “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today…you have only to keep still.”
How hard it is to keep still when we are lost… To calm ourselves, to ground ourselves in our deepest truths and hopes, to open ourselves to the unknown, to trust in something beyond ourselves.
We strengthen all these muscles when we engage in the Spiritual Practice of Getting Lost.
…We can practice getting lost by going on silent retreat, and becoming so familiar with our minds’ wanderings that we occasionally glimpse instead the expansive, peaceful silence beneath all the thoughts.
…We can practice getting lost by learning about a culture or religion or experience very different from ours, from the people who actually live it… When we can resist judgment, or analysis, we may discover a perspective that becomes a gift.
…We can practice getting lost by listening deeply to someone’s pain without trying to fix it, or someone’s joy without trying to one-up with our own. We can learn real empathy, a gift.
…I practiced getting lost one election year by volunteering to “Get Out the Vote” in an impoverished neighborhood. I didn’t want to knock on strangers’ doors; I wasn’t familiar with the neighborhoods; I hadn’t ever stood on a balcony that was about to crumble due to a landlord’s neglect. Yet, I learned a lot about my fellow neighbors and myself.
Getting lost acquaints us with vulnerability, with new connections, with a world bigger than the one we once occupied.
As we practice choosing the experience of being lost, we more and more understand that getting lost isn’t a detour, it’s the path; getting lost isn’t only about losing but also about receiving; and that the wilderness is God’s wilderness, a wilderness full of not only beasts but angels, “and plenty of other lost people, too” (Taylor).
I’d like to close with this poem by Edward Abbey, he titles it Benedicto, so I think it’s okay for me to call it a blessing. May it bless us.
Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Taylor, Barbara Brown, 2009. An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. (New York: HarperOne)