by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a leaky tire.

Somewhere, over the rainbow… that’s where the airline will find my luggage.

It’s a small world, so you’ll have to use your elbows a lot.

This land is your land. This land is my land. Stay on your land.

If you don’t like my driving, don’t call anyone. Just take another road. That’s why the highway department made so many of them.

It takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown, and fewer still to ignore someone completely.

When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

You cannot tell which way the train went by looking at the track.

Never wrestle with a pig: You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

Ah, the joys of summer.

We all carry memories of summer—maybe it is time by a lake, trips with the family, that first summer job. Maybe summer wasn’t much fun at all in our memory. Maybe it is boredom from all the time we had and really time spent wishing we could get back to school. And the summer that we plan for may not always be what we end up with. What we expect from the time may not be what really happens. It is really true that sometimes you need a vacation at the end of your vacation to recover.

But summer is a time of great possibility. It is the season that offers space more than any other season. It is the time when schedules are not so tight. It is the time when warm days call us to slow down and move at a little slower pace. I have memories of my childhood of the time that I would spend in the summer by the creek that ran by our house in the country. It was a creek that fed into the river a hundred yards away. I remember sitting and watching the clear water run by, the watercress growing gently in the water. I remember the spot where Fuzzy Peterson kept his live fishing bait. As a shy child, it was a place where I could spend what seemed to be hours. Time did not seem to have a beginning or an ending but simply lasted as long as it lasted. On hot summer days it was cool and mysterious and a place where I loved to be.

It is harder to find that kind of space anymore. That spacious sense of time is something that is rare for me these days. I had it when I spent time on my sabbatical in Bali. I remember how the time seemed to have no beginning and no ending but simply passed in the time that it took to pass. I remember that wonderful sense of being lost in that time and have all that space to think about whatever it was that I wanted to think about.

But going to Bali is not always an option for all kinds of reasons and in this beautiful part of the world where we live there is more than any of us could find to do in one time and place. And it shouldn’t be that we have to go someplace exotic to find such a peace. But I also know that getting away from things can be an elusive goal. In the culture we live in, it gets harder to find time and space that feel like they are not just more of what we have already.  

We live in times when we can get up-to-the minute you name it. The weather, the news, the e-mail and office messages. We can drive through something to get whatever it is we need—even church if you live in the right place. We are bombarded with sights and sounds from all kinds of sources—television, radio, cell phones, or from the e-mail we tune into after work in the evenings or from the regular pile of mail that comes our way day by day. All the technology and resources we have are supposed to decrease the time it takes to do things, and they can, but what happens is we just get more and more things on our plate, more things to do, less time for ourselves. Instead of getting simpler, life simply gets busier. The amount of information we process increases dramatically.

Juliet Schor, author of “The Overworked American,” says we live in an economy and society that are demanding too much from people. And lots of messages tell us to just go faster, usually by buying more stuff. You buy the right piece of exercise equipment that requires only 20 minutes, three times per week. This will help you have dinner on the table in 10 minutes instead of 20.

There is a paradox that we live with in our times: the tools that should be making us work less only make it possible that we are on all the time. And in this setting, distinctions between work and play and everything else become less and less clear. We end up with the image of the cell phone man who goes around asking if we can hear him now, there at the beach in his bathing suit still trying out his cell phone. And we may get a glimpse of ourselves and the challenges that come in organizing our lives, let alone time in summer.

But finding space for ourselves at some point in the year, whether it is summer or not, is important. We need space to allow us to not only do, but also to be.

The poet Rilke said: “I have so often asked myself whether the days on which we are compelled to be idle aren’t the very ones we spend in the deepest activity? Whether our actions themselves, when they come later, are not merely the last afterring of a great movement that takes in us on inactive days?”

But we have to find ways to get ourselves into that different place. The writer Kathleen Norris tells a story from when she worked as an artist in elementary schools in North Dakota. She devised an exercise for the children about noise and silence. She would make a deal with them—first they get to make noise and then they would make silence.

The rules for the noise were simple. When she would raise her hand, they could make all the noise they wanted while sitting at their desks using their mouths, hands and feet. Norris tells about how their eyes would grow wide with these instructions, so she would add: “the important thing is that when I lower my hand, you have to stop.”

The rules for silence were just as simple. Kids couldn’t hold their breaths or make funny faces. After a couple tries, Norris found, the children were able to become still and the silence became a presence in the classroom.

Some of the children loved it, asking to do it again. Others were not so sure. One fifth grader said it was scary for him. When asked why, he said: “It’s like we’re waiting for something—it’s scary!”

Norris said what was so interesting is how the silence liberated the imagination of the children. When making noise, most of the images they came up with were clichés. They were not that creative. But in the silence, there was a different quality to their writing. The silence seemed to make them go deeper and to be more creative.

Said one third-grader: “Silence is like spiders spinning their webs, it’s like a silkworm making its silk. Lord, help me to know when to be silent.”

And another girl offered this wisdom: “Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.”

Finding space for the silence is what the time of summer should be about.

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

Sometimes, on a summer morning,

having taken my accustomed bath,

I sat in my sunny doorway

from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie,

amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,

in undisturbed solitude and stillness,

while the birds sang around.

I grew in those seasons

like corn in the night,

and they were far better

than any work of the hands would have been.

They were not time subtracted from my life,

but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Thoreau, of course, was able to go live in the woods for a time. For most of us, that may not be an option, even if we want it to be. But he does touch on that quality in life that stillness can bring to us. But we need that space and finding it allows us to grow like the corn in the night.

Creating space is not necessarily something we can schedule. If we try to hard we’ll probably miss what it is we need to find. Now, I’m not necessarily sure that vacations far away are what we need. I’m not even saying that it needs to come in the form of a vacation an hour away. Vacations are nice, but we don’t have to go all that far to be away.

But what we do need more than that is the mindset that allows us to be away. The mindset that allows us to be in a different space, to see our lives a little differently. It is the place where we find our creativity, where we think of things that we may not have thought of otherwise. But it is in that place that we find fertile ground for the imagination. We are better able to see things in ways that we have not been able to see them before. And hopefully we are opened up in the process. It is the place where we will find our assumptions challenged.

I once had the experience of being with a group that ate a meal together in silence. On this particular evening, we cooked a meal together and then ate the first part of the meal without speaking. The goal was what you might expect: to pay attention to our eating, to the taste of the food, to the sounds that we usually wouldn’t pay attention to. But it took some time to get there. At first things were pretty awkward. We had to get used to the sounds of the silverware hitting the plate and the sounds of chewing. We had to get used to a strange feeling of facing others around a table and deliberately not talking. This was a new way of relating.

But after a while I got used to this and I found myself starting to pay attention to the taste of the food, the texture of the food, how some things were crunchy and others were soft. The colors of the food seemed more vibrant as I looked at them in a different way. I thought of where the food came from, the hands that had prepared it. I was aware of all the flavors. I was aware how I instinctively slowed down my eating, and how good the food tasted.

It is easy to rush through the events of our lives, to not pay attention and not to be aware. I think that gets to the call I feel in the summertime. The idea is to step out of the familiar and in the place of unfamiliarity see the present through a new lens.

Life reveals itself in new ways, if we are open to seeing it.

Writer Thomas Moore talks about the architecture of the Pantheon in Rome and how there is an oculus or eye in the top of the temple 140 feet above the stone floor. The emperor wanted this hole in the top to reveal the sky so the temple could mirror the human condition of being both exposed to the infinite universe and enclosed in its own shelter. In some Native American traditions, there is a hole in the top of the shaman’s lodge. This is believed to be a hole to the sky. Through this hole the soul can take flight and communicate with the heavens.

At the heart of the spiritual journey is an appreciation for the mystery that surrounds us and holds us. We cannot fully know much of our lives—we cannot quantify much of our lives—but the mystery will be revealed as we are open to that mystery being revealed.

We are living in times that are not easy times. My heart is heavy these days with the violence that is so prevalent around us. There are times when I just don’t want to hear any more about all that is going on in the world. The world is hurting and there is much need for healing and sometimes it is not at all clear where that healing will begin. There’s the story of the priest in the midst of all kinds of personal and congregational chaos and loss. When asked how he coped, he said the busier he was, the more he prayed.

That is the place where healing begins. It begins not just with our own living and thinking and feeling but with the awareness that all we do is done in service to something larger. That we bring our voices to the struggle.

Words of poet William Stafford:

The earth says every summer have a ranch

that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape

that proclaims a universe—sermon

of the hills, hallelujah mountain,

highway guided by the way the world is tilted,

reduplication of mirage, flat evening:

a kind of ritual for the wavering.

The earth says where you live wear the kind

of color that your life is (gray shirt for me)

and by listening with the same bowed head that sings

draw all into one song, join

the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy

way, the rage without met by the wings

within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.

Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.

My wish for you this summer is simple:

May you have space to be and not just to do.

May you have a space where listening is possible.

May your hear the earth, the voices of children, your own voice laughing or singing, the voice of the creation speaking just to you, hearing the call of how you might live in the world, the earth speaking exactly what it is you need to hear.  Amen.

Let us pray. God who moves in ways so subtle we may only see in fragments, help us to be present to all that is our life. May we be seekers and risk takers, listeners and speakers. May we be aware always of our connection. May that connection ground us in all that we do. And through it all, may we find healing in our lives and in our world. We ask this in the name of all we hold sacred. Amen.

Benediction

May you be surprised this summer. May you be renewed no matter where you find yourself. May you know love and may you know peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.