My family has now been here in Arlington for a little more than a year. We have had a wonderful time exploring this area. We dearly love living in this part of the country.
BUT – I have to tell you that there is one big problem with living here: we have never been lost so often and so hopelessly as we have since we moved here. I can’t tell you how many times I have been driving along these serpentine roads without any idea where I was or how to get where I was going.
The streets, as you well know, change names more frequently than Madonna changes clothes. And many of the roads wind around like a maze. Sometimes I’ll head for McLean only to end up in Alexandria. Or I’ll drive towards Alexandria only to find myself -- and this has happened frequently -- going over one of those darn bridges into Washington D.C.
Finally I can manage to get around our neighborhood most of the time without being lost. And I can usually make it to church and home without ending up in Maryland. But when we drive somewhere new, we load up on maps, and we say our prayers that we will make it back home again eventually.
Getting lost is a metaphor for other ways we get lost in our lives:
spiritually lost, unable to find meaning and purpose in our lives;
- lost in grief when a loved one dies;
- lost in loneliness when we feel unloved;
- lost in fear when our life is threatened by illness or injury.
How do you find your way when you are lost? What kind of map do you use? And who do you ask for directions?
Arlington is certainly not the only place I’ve been lost. One of the worst times I’ve ever been lost was in West Virginia.
Our family had recently moved to Cleveland from New Orleans. We had attended the Southeastern Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute -- or SUUSI -- in Radford, Virginia for many years, and when we moved to Cleveland we decided we would go one more year to say goodbye to colleagues and friends. So Terry and I packed our four children up in the van and headed south.
I would like to blame our getting lost on Terry, but I must confess that I did play a part -- not a very big part I’m sure -- in the entire mess. When we travel, Terry and I always have this creative tension between us: I want to get to our destination as quickly as possible and she wants to stop at every scenic sight, country market, and rest-stop she sees. Our trips are a continual negotiation about where and when to stop.
When we came close to the Virginia border, Terry lobbied to exit the big bad turnpike where you can't see the real people or the real country and to drive the back roads to Radford. I guess I did compound the problem by making a stereotypical male blunder: I refused to stop for a map or directions. We carried the old faithful Rand McNally which was fine for interstate driving but woefully inadequate for the mountainous roads of West Virginia.
My personal mythology stated clearly that real men didn't need maps. Right guys? Did Daniel Boone need a map? Did Davey Crocket need a map? Did Lewis and Clark need a map? No. I knew that Radford was somewhere to the east and that's all I needed to know. If I kept driving east, I was bound to hit Radford . . . someday.
I finally did realize that I was completely lost and agreed to sacrifice a small fragment of manhood by stopping at a little general store and asking that profound existential question: "Which way to Radford?" The storekeeper, who looked as old as the mountains and spoke in a language that vaguely resembled English, spat out a litany of directions that I methodically stored in my memory banks (real men don't write directions down either). A few miles down the road I was asking myself, "Now did he say to turn left at the second farm on the right or to turn right at the second farm on the left?"
I kept driving on and on, but the farther we went the worse the road became, finally turning into a narrow dirt road with no stores, no homes, no farms, no nothing but trees surrounding us.
There we were! Completely lost! I had no idea where to go. I had visions of never being found. Our four children were hungry, tired, thirsty, and had to go to the bathroom immediately. I was furious at myself, Terry, and God.
Just then Terry spotted a farm up ahead and our hopes of finding civilization returned. Perhaps this was the outskirts of a town. We could stop and ask for directions. I would even buy a map at any price. Perhaps we could even use their bathroom. Finally we pulled up in front of the small farm and to our dismay we saw a sign in the front yard that read "In the Middle of Nowhere Farm."
There was a happy ending to this story. We drove past the farm, continuing along the dirt road for what seemed an eternity until we finally reached a paved road that took us out of the wilderness and into Virginia. I did buy a map, we did make it to Radford, everyone was able to go to the bathroom, and we had a wonderful week at SUUSI. What is even more important is that I learned something about myself and the world. I learned the value of maps.
I'm sure all of us have had experiences like the one described in the old spiritual, "Twas lost but now I'm found." In fact, being lost and found is one of the major themes of the spiritual journey.
Siddartha Gautama roamed around the Indian countryside for years before he finally gained enlightenment under a bodhi tree and achieved Buddhahood.
Moses led his people through the Red Sea only to get them lost in the middle of nowhere desert for 40 years.
Jesus spent forty days in the desert, meditating and praying, trying to find his way towards holiness.
Like Buddha, Moses and Jesus, each of us wanders through the desert of despair from time to time. When we enter into the world as infants we are lost in a state of confusion, and then we spend a lifetime trying to find a map that will take us home.
At times we do feel found, we do feel at home, but then we enter into the chaos of adolescence, or we go through the pain of divorce, or we grieve the loss of someone we love, or we become trapped in an addiction. And once again, even decades after that first futile cry escapes our lungs, we are lost, looking for a map, searching for a path with heart, desperately seeking a home.
If only we had a map. If only we could find a way out of the middle of nowhere. If only we had a compass that told us which direction to go to find truth and happiness.
...Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life, writes M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
This internal map of reality and truth that Scott Peck presents is a helpful image to me. I’ve always loved maps. As a teenager, I collected maps from around the world, pillaging them from every National Geographic I could lay my hands on, and then covering my walls with them. I guess I had an urge to know where I was going in my life.
One of my favorite spiritual growth exercises is to have a group of people draw a map of their lives on a large piece of poster paper with a road representing their passage through life, and mountains and rivers and forests representing obstacles and opportunities. I find that when people share their spiritual maps with each other, they are often deeply moved by this glimpse of where they’ve been and where they’re going in their lives. It’s a profound way to get to know each other at a deeper level.
The problem many people run into, however, is that their spiritual maps have been inherited in tact from their parents or their culture. And they believe their map of reality is in perfect form, and so they don't bother revising it adequately as they grow older.
But the terrain of life is much more fluid than that. Reality is constantly changing, always in flux. Being seventy is different from being thirty. Being divorced is different than being married. Being unemployed is different than being employed. The reality of being black or white, male or female, gay or straight, American or Hispanic changes who we are.
Have you seen those distorted maps they sell in many souvenir stores? When we lived in New Orleans, I remember seeing one that showed the city of New Orleans taking up the vast majority of the map, then Louisiana taking up about another quarter of the map, and then in the small amount of room left were diminutive outlines of the rest of the United States and Canada. The purpose of the map is to tell us in a humorous way that New Orleans is at the center of the universe, which, for those of us who have lived there, it tends to be.
Unfortunately, many people live with this kind of distorted internal map, seeing themselves as the center of the universe and where they live as sacred space while other people and places and cultures remain insignificant. A more helpful and healthful map is the one you see on some posters and T-shirts that shows a picture of the Milky Way with a small dot in the middle and the words You are here pointing to that speck called earth.
To be dedicated to truth we must constantly be exploring the lay of the land, the environment that surrounds us, and adjusting our internal maps to coincide with what we see and sense and experience. That's why Unitarian Universalists rely on the authority of personal experience more heavily than the authority of tradition or leadership. We have learned that our own rationality and senses are more reliable than someone else's interpretation of reality. We follow our own maps rather than the maps foisted upon us by others.
As I told our New UU participants yesterday, Unitarian Universalism is a demanding faith. We expect you to use all of your resources to build a belief system, value system and ethical system that will help you to effectively navigate the landscape of modern life. We expect you to chart your journey into the future.
What does your personal and spiritual map look like? Have you charted out where you want to go for the rest of your life and how you will get there? What are the obstacles on your map and how will you get over or around them?
Our church is the AAA of spiritual map-making, the Mapquest of finding directions for our life. For many of us the “X” on the cover of the Order of Service marks the spot where we come to find help in making a map that will lead us out of the middle of nowhere and into the promised land of meaning and purpose. It is here that we learn to be navigators of the soul.
That doesn’t mean we won’t get lost. In fact, we help you get lost. Too often we are so busy following the direction of others, that we don’t allow ourselves to wander in the wilderness of our soul in search of our own inner compass. The truth is that we need to get lost in order to find our way. As Sara Moores Campbell writes:
Wilderness is a part of every person’s soul-journey, and part of our journey together as human beings who seek to live in community. Time in the wilderness is always a time of struggle. It is also a time of transformation and renewal.
An inspiring model of finding our way through the wilderness is the Aboriginal people of Australia. Did you see the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Sydney on Friday night? It was beautiful. It also reminded me of the two glorious sabbaticals my family spent in South Australia where I served the Unitarian Church there. I also explored the Aboriginal culture, learning to appreciate a deep spirituality that has grown over 60,000 years.
The Walkabout has long been a meaningful ritual for the Aboriginals. A Walkabout is an opportunity to journey into the wilderness of the Australian outback in search of the way home. Aboriginals tread in the same footprints of the Ancestors and sing the Ancestors songs while they wander about.
Eons ago, when the earth was barely formed, great Spirits, in both human and animal form, erupted out of the earth onto the barren featureless landscape. Some, like the Rainbow Serpent, pushed upward from beneath the ground creating huge ridges, mountains and gorges. Others came from the sky, or from distant islands across the sea.
And then for eons of mythological time these colossal creatures roamed across the earth digging out rivers by slithering through the mud, knocking out valleys with a swish of a tail, splitting mountains with their lightning bolts, and singing the world into existence. The Ancestors set in motion the whole pattern of life as Aboriginal people know it today. Even now it is believed that they govern the seasons and the growth of vegetation, as well as the life and death of all living things. Even now we are living in the Dreamtime.
When Aboriginals go Walkabout, wandering across the desert landscape, they are guided by the internal maps of stories and song they have learned through the years. The mountains and rivers and animals are not mere landmarks but they are alive with spirit, guiding the Aboriginals along the landscape of their soul as well as the earth. In their Walkabout, they bring the Dreamtime back to life, so that everything becomes enchanted.
If only our maps were like the spirit maps of the Aboriginals with every stone and bird a revelation and a blessing. Perhaps this is what life is all about, wandering through the wilderness on our individual Walkabouts until we discover that being lost is the first step towards being found.
How many of you have seen at least part of the public television series with Bill Moyers called “On Our Own Terms”? Moyers crosses the country from hospitals to hospices to homes to capture intimate stories about the way people live and die. He gives us painful and inspiring glimpses into the mystery of suffering and loss.
Our maps do eventually come to an end. The road cannot go on forever. And how we cope with the loss of those we love and of our own lives depends on how well we have navigated the smaller deaths along the way.
Two Sundays ago I told a story from Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, “Kitchen Table Wisdom.” This story if from her newest book, “My Grandfather’s Blessings.” Both books have incredibly inspiring stories by patients she has counseled as a physician and counselor.
Enid was an older woman whose husband had died unexpectedly two years before she came to see Dr. Remen. The woman was withdrawn and distant, not having cried or spoken of his death to anyone in all that time. And during their counseling appointments, she would say little. She was in a wilderness of pain.
Finally Dr. Remen asked, “If he was here, Enid, what would you tell him?” After telling her husband all the difficulties of her life since he had died, she broke down and cried. When her tears stopped, Dr. Remen asked if there was anything else she would like to say to him.
Hesitantly she told him how angry she was with him for abandoning her to grow old alone. And she told him how terribly she had missed him and all that he had brought into her life.
Finally Dr. Remen asked, “Enid, if Herbert were here, what would he say to you about the way you have lived the last two years of your life?” She looked startled, and then stated, “Why, he would say, ?Enid, why have you built a monument of pain in memory of me? My whole life was about love.’...”
Hopefully our lives too are about love. But love is painful. As Dr. Remen writes, “Every great loss demands that we choose life again. .. Grieving is not about forgetting. Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than with pain.”
By the way, “a year after that meeting, Enid sent Dr. Remen a clipping from the local paper about a group of widows she had organized to help elderly people with the tasks they could not do for themselves at home. There was a note with the clipping [with a short poem she had written]: ?Grief. / I pull up anchor, / and catch the wind.’”
Like the Buddha, Moses and Jesus -- and like Enid -- we will get lost in the middle of nowhere, but in our wanderings we will find that each of us is an explorer of vast oceans of silence and solitude, a discoverer of mysterious continents of possibilities arising within, a navigator charting new maps to guide us and those who follow through the mazes of meaning.
We are not in the middle of nowhere. We are hopeful. We are healed. We are home.
Amen.
