by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given December 7, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We gather here today

To remind ourselves of the values we hold dear,

To ask forgiveness for the times we have

failed ourselves and others,

And to pledge ourselves anew to live with integrity, with caring,

and with love.

Come now, and let us worship together.

I don’t know about you, but every year about this time, I begin wanting to “change my life.”  It seems that everything I don’t like about the way I’m living becomes more intensified.  I’m busier than I want to be.  It’s hard for me to keep to my exercise regime.  And as for eating right, it’s almost impossible.  Then there is the commercial element of this time of year, which is so overwhelming.  So much stuff, when I’m trying hard to get rid of the excess stuff in my life.  Even my dreams fill with visions of inadequacy, and I just want to live differently.

So especially this time of the year I feel a need for reflection and change, but the truth is that for me, all of life seems to be a kind of movement toward change, a kind of pilgrimage.  There is a kind of restlessness, a searching, a reaching for something more.  There are particular times when I am called out of myself.  I can go along for years, pretty much in the same manner, and then somehow the time for change is right, and I move to a new place.

There have been more than a few of these times.  Usually the process begins with discomfort, maybe even a depression or an illness. All is not well.  I become grouchy, irritable. Kind of like a snake shedding its skin—you know, you don’t want to get near a snake when it’s shedding, because it can’t see well, and it’ll strike at anything.  I have come to see this period as a “holy uneasiness,” when my spirit is restless and uncertain.  I try to think my way through the dilemma, usually to no avail.  I might walk down this or that or the other road, to try to get to a new place, and typically come to a few dead ends.  I become frustrated and even more depressed.  But the place I need to travel to keeps pulling at me, and it emerges in time, and for me, it usually comes intuitively.  

This was the case when I decided to study writing with Wendell Berry, the essayist, novelist, and poet.  Many of you know his work.  He lives in rural Kentucky, where he farms and writes.  I was living in Lexington, KY, at the time, and was a stay-at-home mom of two small children in an unhappy marriage.  I began having headaches that were diagnosed as psychosomatic.  So I went to therapy, and I signed up for a writing class with Wendell at the University of Kentucky.  Now I knew I was a fine writer, and since I was terribly in need of feeling good about myself, I thought taking a writing class would be an easy way to get a few strokes. 

My first paper was a reasoned and objective essay on examinations.  The next week Wendell returned our papers.  He wrote only one statement on my paper.  He wrote:  “Why don’t you give me something of yourself.”  I was devastated.  I just held the paper and stared at it and big silent tears kept inching their way out of my eyes and wouldn’t stop.  It took me the whole semester to finally do what he asked—to give him something of myself.  I stayed up all night before the morning of our last class writing a long autobiographical essay.  I finished it with my older son sitting on my lap as I typed. 

It was just before Christmas and big flakes of snow were falling as I drove to class.   Frightened and reluctant, I read to the class this piece of writing in which, for the first time, I was honest about who I was and the kind of joy and the kind of suffering that were a part of my life.  It was a moment of transformation.  When I left the classroom that day, I had gained myself—but in that same moment I lost the marriage.  There was an internal shift that I could not deny.  No headaches, but no marriage.  I continued to do independent study with Wendell, and one day I said to him, “Wendell, you changed my life.”  And he replied, “I didn’t change anything.  I just asked you to write well.”  To write honestly, to write precisely and accurately.  And that of course changed everything. 

These times of authentic change take us to strange and amazing places.  Note I did not say “comfortable” places. I did not say “easy” places.  But places where you can live with more truth and integrity.  There is a realm of spiritual freedom and joy that doesn’t rest in a particular moment, or a particular achievement, but is a bedrock kind of thing.  That’s what I’m after.  When I walked into class on that first day, I just wanted to get some praise, some respect.  But I had to get that from myself, I learned.  I had to become a person I could respect.  In spite of my weaknesses and failures.  In spite of the pain and disappointment I caused others. 

Now I want to explore in more depth the qualities and characteristics of pilgrimage. 

As I said, it often starts with an uneasiness, a holy uneasiness, I have called it.  Why holy?  Because it is the movement of the Spirit within.  It is the interior voice that’s calling for movement towards wholeness.  Wendell Berry says in one of his poems, “It’s the impeded stream that sings,” and I have found that to be true.  The impediment brings the focus and direction that may be difficult to find otherwise, and the singing, oh, we do sing when we’re called upon to sing, and that’s what trouble can do—can help us find our voice. 

We move, then, intuitively.  We are the Magi going through the night, we know not where, following the uncertainty of the star.  Is it real?  Now you see it, now you don’t.  Ah, there it is again.  We are drawn once more, and we continue to follow.  We know that there is a dimension to life beyond getting and spending.  We know there is a place of awe and of miracles, and when we visit that dimension, we know that that is our true home. 

Sometimes we are struck down, as on the road to Damascus, and we know that we need to pay attention.  Sometimes our pilgrimage takes us to a special location.  We need to literally walk in the footsteps of Jesus, or bathe in the Ganges, or travel to the Wailing Wall.  Or sometimes the place we travel to is not a religious site, in the strictest sense of the word—but it may have great spiritual import, nonetheless.  I remember returning to Homer, the little North Louisiana town where I grew up, after being away for many years.  I went back to the house where I had lived.  I moved through the rooms with a sense of awe.  The rooms, the rooms were so much smaller than I had remembered, and the fear that had made me feel small was just not there any more. It was just a house, a simple white-frame house, with the breakfast room that slanted down a bit, the dining room with its row of windows looking out at the apple tree, the front porch with the rocking chairs where we escaped the summer sun.  It was the same, but it had changed.  No, I had changed.

Another place of awe for me was the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.  It was a pilgrimage long in coming—I went just a few years ago.  To see the curving black sweep of names, going on and on and on, to see the tiny flags and flowers and written messages left by those who have not forgotten, who will never forget, simply took my breath away—and war took on a kind of personal horror and loss that I had never before felt.  So many sons and husbands and brothers gone.

I should say at this point that pilgrimage often requires us to follow our fears.  To go where we don’t want to go.  To revisit loss.  Or to take on a new challenge that we don’t know how in the world we can meet.  I say to follow the fear because that’s where the juice is.  That’s where we need to go.  Pilgrimage is not a way to “play it safe.”  Those who went to Selma for the Civil Rights marches were not safe—in fact, people died witnessing for Civil Rights, including two Unitarian Universalists who are honored on the memorial outside the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.  On a pilgrimage that is valid, there is a sense that you are in the right place, doing what you should be doing.  There is a kind of spiritual security that goes beyond physical safety.

Know that sacrifice is part of the deal.  Sacrifice is kind of a foreign concept to most of us in this culture.  We wonder at the pilgrims who journey for days and days to reach Mecca or the penitent who crawls on his knees for miles to a holy site.  Monks at Mt. Hiei, near Kyoto, Japan, spend seven years walking up and down the mountain, including nine consecutive days without food, water, or sleep.  They want nothing more than to be emptied of ego, which is of course where every spiritual path leads. The word sacrifice itself is telling—it is from the Latin sacri-ficium, which means “making sacred.”  Sacrifice not for its own sake, but sacrifice to sanctify.

Pilgrimage requires us to leave expectations behind.  We are used to thinking of taking a trip to get somewhere, but now we must just travel, with a sense of curiosity and wonder.  We will find companions along the way.  We will find surprises.  But certainty is not a part of the journey.  Paradoxically, if you know where you’re going, you probably will never get there. 

A pilgrim takes on the innocence of a child.  He moves to a place of not knowing, and such a journey therefore requires faith and it requires courage.  If I let go of the trapeze bar as I sail through the air, will another be there, hanging in the emptiness?  If I let go of the trapeze bar of comfort, of being right, of possessions, of whatever is keeping me safe, of all that makes me feel superior to others, what will happen?  What will happen?

Consider the difference in going somewhere as a pilgrim and going as a tourist.  There is some overlap, of course.  A tourist may happen upon a sacred place and feel a spiritual presence, and a pilgrim may find herself in a bazaar, shopping.  There’s nothing wrong with that. But fundamentally, the pilgrim goes into new territory, mixes with the population, eats their food, travels their way, knows that cathedrals are holy places, not just art museums.  Pilgrimage leaves us at least open to the possibility of transformation.

Consider again the Magi, the three wise men who came from the East to worship the baby Jesus.  They were soothsayers and astrologers from somewhere within the Persian Empire, men of stature and influence.  They dropped everything for the long journey, and they brought precious gifts to the Christ child, traveling all that way to be in the presence of the Sacred.  Like them, we pilgrims bring our gifts, we give up our usual place of honor, and kneel by the crib of the child—that is to say, we kneel to innocence, give ourselves to innocence, to new life.

The pilgrim, then, walks humbly on the path, letting go of certainty, of safety, of position, of power.  The pilgrim is surrendered to experience and open to transformation.  You know, coming to church periodically is in itself a kind of pilgrimage.  You enter the large doors that are not so easy to open.  You come into the narthex, where you are greeted, but you are not yet in holy space.  You enter the sanctuary, the place of worship, and the music begins, and you are here with the others, your companions on the journey.  You are here not because you have nothing better to do on Sunday morning, you are not even here chiefly to see your friends, as pleasant as that may be.  You are here because it is possible, just possible, that you will be moved to a new place.  That you will become more compassionate, that you will come to love yourself just a little better, that you may find the impetus to stop behaviors that are self-destructive or destructive to others, that you will feel the love in your heart beginning to grow stronger, and you will know more surely how you are connected to all people, and to all that is. 

This past week at our church orientation session, one woman said to me, “You know, I’ve been coming now for three years, and I’ve just decided to join.  The whole first year I cried during every service.  I don’t know why, but I did.”  I told her that that was not unusual.  A lot of people cry during our services.  I can’t be sure why, but I think maybe it’s because people can be who you are here, can be truly honest and feel whatever they feel, and there are not that many places in this world where you can do that.  And I think many of you allow yourselves to be in that state of innocence and faith, so that you are moved and changed. 

I would like to think that I merely invite transformation in others, and don’t insist upon it, but sometimes I can be a bit pushy.  I know that.  Just the other day I was doing my walk in the Lloyd Center Mall, and I stopped to put on my jacket before going out into the cold again, and a man at a booth stopped me.  He was selling window frames, and not doing a lot of business.  It’s just not the season for window frames.  You know, “Hi, Honey, you’ll never guess what I got you for Christmas—a vinyl window frame.” 

So anyway, he stops me and he says, “Hi, there.  I don’t suppose you need a window frame today, do you?” 

“Nope,” I say, putting my gloves on. 

“Are you sure?” he says.  Well, that’s where he made his mistake.  He wants to be engaged?  Okay, I’ll engage him.  I move closer.  “Those things are made of vinyl, aren’t they?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. 

“Do you know about vinyl?” I say.  “Do you know what it does to the people who manufacture it?  Do you know that the plant residue is poison?  Do you know that vinyl is indestructible, that it will be on the earth forever?” 

He looks kind of sheepish.  “Yes, it’s pretty nasty stuff,” he says

“Well,” I say, pointing my finger at his chest, “Don’t spend your life selling it.” 

I guess this pushiness around change, this preachiness, is an occupational hazard.  Or maybe it’s my own sense of guilt in realizing all the ways I have compromised myself, all the ways I fall short of being the person I want to be. 

So why become a pilgrim wanderer, a searcher, following your fear, eschewing security, always being a little uncertain?  Well, for me at least, that’s what life is about—fundamentally, it is a spiritual journey, and so if I’m not on the road, then I’m missing the essence of life.  And that makes me bored and restless.  I want to have experiences that fill me with awe; I want to be surprised; I want to go deeper.  I want to become the person I was meant to be and when I come to the end of my life, I want to know that I have been at the party and danced the dance. 

As for you, I will be respectful, I promise, knowing that you are where you need to be just now, as am I.  But I will invite you always to consider what is pulling at you, that longing that would take you to the place of your deepest satisfaction and fulfillment.  Perhaps you need to reclaim some lost part of yourself.  Perhaps you need to honor a vow, or to give thanks, or to love the way you’ve never been able to love before.  Come along.  Step on out.  The journey is yours to take.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, you speak to us in so many ways.  May we be open to your invitations, for we know that they will lead us to the life we would have.  Forgive us for letting opportunities pass us by because we are afraid.  Give us, O Spirit of Life, faith and give us courage.  And now as we travel further into the holidays, keep us grounded in the true spirit of the season, present to one another, and open to new ways of being.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you leave this good company of people, know that you have companions on your journey.  Travel well.  Be not afraid.  Go in love and go in peace.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2003, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.