Carry me on. Carry me on.
What is it that’s carrying you on these days? What is it that’s keeping you going? What is it that’s helping you find your way home?
I don’t have to remind any of us, I expect, of all there is to hold these days. So much. Too much. And in times that can feel like too much, knowing where we can turn, knowing what it is that will carry us, well, that’s an important question.
I have to admit to you this morning that I’m pretty on edge right now. Maybe you are too. This week my ballot arrived and when I saw it there in my mail basket my heart started to race just a bit. I brought the mail into the house and put it on the pile where the mail usually goes but I couldn’t leave the ballot just sitting there, I couldn’t wait to fill it out. And when I delivered it to the county voting headquarters the next time I was out for errands, and then when I got the email confirmation that my ballot had been accepted, well, it was all strangely cathartic. Maybe in these days of polls and forums and rhetoric and misinformation, maybe it was the simple, concrete task of filling out a ballot that gave me something to else to focus on, something familiar, something I could do.
No these are not at all easy times and I’d like to make some space to reflect on what it is that will carry us through these days. I’m looking forward to the election being over but there will still be plenty of things to face after that, on Nov. 4, or Nov. 7 or 8 or heaven forbid, some date much later, when we will finally know the outcome.
And unfortunately, I very much doubt that that sense of chaos that has so much been part of our lives for so long will just be over. No, I fear that is much yet to come.
Perhaps one of the most challenging things in these times is that sense of being pulled in so many directions. It might be the right tweet. It might be the right email. It might be the right political ad. I have tried to be disciplined to what I expose myself to when it comes to media—I at least try to have a bit of control over it—but truth be told my own record on that account has been a little spotty especially lately.
And given all that maybe it is even more important to be asking ourselves just what it is we should be doing right now. Voting, yes. And supporting the causes and candidates we support, definitely yes. And maybe asking what it is we need to find our way through all of this. For me it is about trying to be as clear as a can about what’s important, trying to be as clear as I can about the stakes of this election. And maybe asking what it is I need to be in less of a reactive place and in more of a grounded place in these days and weeks ahead.
My call for us this morning is a call to that place, where ever that may be for each of us. Because there’s too much going on right now for us to not be engaged. That just isn’t an option. But being aware of our grounding, what it is that will help us through these days, what will help us to be clear, making space for that, I hope, is an option.
Our spiritual theme this month is home and maybe that is a good place to begin.
Home. What does that word bring to mind for you? The place where you are sitting right now viewing this service? Maybe an image of the place where you grew up? Maybe it is a place in our larger home, in a park or some other beautiful place.
And maybe the word home is not something comforting. Maybe it is a word that stirs fear as in might I lose the home I have or when will I have a place to call home once again? I’d be remiss to not name the reality that home is not at all a secure place for so many right now. Coming here to the church on Sundays is a pretty sobering reality. Especially as these days get shorter and colder and whether I’m reminded of just how fortunate I am. Just how fortunate so many of us are to have not only houses but homes to be in. Our own sense of home might be anything but secure right now.
Home makes me think of a number of places.
The home where I spent my first 18 years was the upper level of the family cheese factory outside of the small town in Wisconsin where I grew up. It was a pretty modest place but also a place where we had all we needed. Nearby was a creek that ran into a river and one of my favorite places was the front yard running down a small hill in front of the house. This time of year in the upper Midwest, with winter approaching, we would have been covering the windows with plastic covering to keep out the cold for the long winter months ahead.
I have a vision of being in that front yard of that home as a child. I was probably four or five years old. I’m lying in the grass and my dogs are with me. I’m looking up at the big blue sky with big white clouds going by and it was maybe my clearest experience of having that sense of oneness with everything. It was a sense that all was well with the world and I was held in all of that. That is an image of home, of place, that I can still call up. All these years later that is still a place I can return to, most of all in times of when the world can weigh heavy.
There’s the home I am fortunate to have now. Probably my favorite place there is my kitchen. Truth be told I’m not sure how I could have gotten through these covid times were it not the cooking. It is where I am fed both literally and figuratively.
And here at the church, this sanctuary, is a kind of home. So many things, so many encounters, so many moments here. ….and now this still kind of surreal experience of preaching to this empty house. I should let you know that I have all of you in my mind even if you aren’t here in person. Oh how I miss your beautiful faces out there every week. That too, has been something that has sustained me in these days.
All of us carry those places with us that we might call home. Those places that have shaped us and that we too have shaped.
In the basement of my home current home are the handwritten stats of young people who used to be live there, their names and ages and heights. The charts that keep track of the games they used to play. When painting that wall it was important to not paint over those, to leave them there the way they are. A reminder that for this time I am one of the caretakers of this place but in some large context it is really hard to say to what extent I am the owner. Maybe caretaker is the better word.
What are those places for you? Are they places of comfort? Are they places of safety? Are they places for you that you may not want to return to? Are they places where you can see how a part of the person you became there was formed? Are those places a part of the person you are now?
Where are those places that can help you connect, or maybe reconnect, to your soul?
When I speak of soul I’m thinking about what we’d claim as our core, our center. What is it that makes us who we are?
And what is it that is constant, what does not change, no matter what it is we face, no matter where it is we are?
The Christian mystic Thomas Merton called soul the true self. Buddhists call it original nature or big self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it a spark of the divine. Humanists call it identity and integrity.
One of my favorite writers is Parker Palmer, a teacher and a Quaker. He identifies these qualities of soul:
–the soul wants to keep us rooted in the ground of our own being, revisiting the tendency of other faculties, like the intellect and ego, to uproot us from who we are.
–the soul wants to keep us connected to the community in which we find life, for it understands that relationships are necessary if we are to thrive.
–the soul wants to tell us the truth about ourselves, our world, and the relation between the two, whether that truth is easy or hard to hear.
–the soul wants to give us life and wants us to pass that gift along.[1]
I think it is always important to pay attention to that soul question, maybe right now more than ever. That soul question calls us to that place of seeing ourselves in relationship with something larger. In a world where there would be so much to pull us off course, where we might find ourselves questioning our own sense of integrity. It brings us back to that place where we come face to face with the fullness of life, in its beauty and also in its brokenness. It brings us back to that place of complexity when we are asked to make sense of a bunch of stuff that can seem contradictory. We are asked to go to that soul place where we don’t find all the answers but we are also better able to make a little more space to sit with it. We live in our bodies, yes, but it is the soul that lets us know we are fully alive and connected to what is around us. It lets us know that life enfolds us.
Everything, it can seem, is just a little more heightened these days. The daily updates on covid infection rates. The updated advice on how it is we are to stay safe. The economic fallout from all of that.
Maybe it is in times like covid when we are more aware of our vulnerability but perhaps also more appreciative of our lives and what it is we do have. This journey can indeed feel pretty complicated sometimes, it can feel as if it is going to be a long one with many parts and detours I expect we can only imagine.
There is a popular teaching from Lao Tzu which is often quoted as: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I recently saw another translation that might be even more helpful. It says that the journey actually begins with the ground beneath us. It begins exactly where we are.
It would be easy in the cynicism and dysfunction of these times to pull back and withdraw but this is actually a time when we are asked to show up and to pay even more attention. You see I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that while these times can feel precarious and even scary, also in the mix right now is a sense of opportunity, of possibility. Part of what has happened with covid has been a shaking up of things, a call for many of us to wake up in ways that we haven’t been asked to wake up before. A call for more aware of the injustices so endemic around us. That is certainly true for the call for black lives and before that the Me, Too movement and the call, the imperative for climate action and justice. All of these movements point us towards not only the peril if we don’t address them together but also to recognize the opportunity to advance our collective freedom, our collective liberation. to recognize our interdependence.
It all starts, I believe, with an invitation for us to move out of that place of soul, that place where we find our grounding, where we might know our true selves.
As our reading today said….
We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.
The visible
and the invisible
working together
in common cause,
to produce
the miraculous.[2]
I hope part of what may make that possible is recognizing what it is we bring. And not only our strengths and all of our gifts but to also make a space for our fears, and maybe even a space to name where we have not lived up to our ideals. It is about bring out best selves forward, to not be shy.
Part of our job is to figure out how it is we find that grounding, where it is we can hang on, where it is we find our connection. How it is we all manage to find our way home.
I was recently reminded of an image that was helpful. In the Midwest farmers could face terrible blizzards in the winter, blizzards so bad that you could get lost between the barn and your homes because the snow and wind were so fierce. Sometimes people could disappear in the blizzard and not be found until spring. So they found a solution to this. As soon as a blizzard would set in they would tie a rope between the barn and the house so that they could use that as a guide to get between the buildings when things were that bad. That is part of how they survived. That is part of how they knew they could be guided safely home, even in the worst of storms.
Life these days can feel like a storm. There is much that would call us in the direction of cynicism and even despair. One of the paradoxes of our times is that in the midst of so much connection, in the midst of so much information, it can be so easy to feel isolated and alone.
Our job is not to know all the answers. Our job is not to take it all on ourselves. Our job is not to be perfect. But our job is to show up and to know what it is that grounds us, knowing that place we might call the home of our soul, knowing that we can come back to that place over and over again, not matter what life brings us, carrying us on, carrying us on.
May it be so. Amen.
Let us pray. Great spirit of life and of love. Remind us of all the blessings we know. Remind us of who we are, of all the places and people, the communities who have helped us along the way. And remind us, spirit, of how are do not make this journey alone. Hold us. Guide us. Ground us as we find our way. Call us to the work of love, the work of justice. Call us to the of liberation, when all of us, together, will know that place we call the beloved community. Amen.
Benediction.
As you go from this service this day, remember to ask yourself how it is with your soul. Live well, live fully, live purposely good people. May you bless the world with your love.
[1] Parker Palmer, “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life,” Jossey Bass, 2002, pp 33-34.
[2] From “Working Together” by David Whyte.
Topics: Home