Ministry

“The magic of travel is that you leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity, but as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine...You return a different person....

To be a real traveler you must be willing to give yourself over to the moment and take yourself out of the centre of your universe. You must believe totally in the lives of the people and the places where you find yourself. You will [then] realize that the possibilities of life in this world are endless, and that beneath our differences of language and culture we all share the same dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow. If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; we don’t hear the sounds around us.

 

We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.

 

[...Travel can simply be strolling through a nearby forest, or to a park bench in a neighbouring town...what matters is that you have left the comfort of the familiar and opened yourself to a world that is totally apart from your own.]

 

Because I have traveled, I know what parts of me I cannot deny and what parts of me are simply choices that I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much of life is pure chance, and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am. “ (from Kent Nerburn’s Simple Truths; ‘On Travel’...adapted jmrb)

 

Comment: Take some time in the joined silence to ponder the many insights in this reading.

Just in case there is someone here for the first time, let me say that I have just returned from a five-month sabbatical graciously granted to me by this religious community. A sabbatical is not a holiday; it is an opportunity to take on a project and also to have the time to reconsider some of life’s BIG questions that keep recurring and that can sometimes be ignored when one is too busy. I’m happy to say I’m in good company by having taken a sabbatical - it’s not only professors and ministers that take them, you know - it’s also cartoonists (like one of my favourites, Gary Larson) and musicians (like Bobby McFerrin) and many others. And I am aware that I will never be able to say enough thank yous to the countless number of people who took on extra responsibilities while I was away -- starting with the Sabbatical Committee, the Worship Committee, the Pastoral Care Team...  and continuing on and on...

The reading of Kent Nerburn’s “On travel” encapsulates my feeling about it. Travel is magical: ‘ you meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine...You return a different person.... [and I am reminded that] we all share the same dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow....knowing how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am. For me travel is, or can be, a deeply spiritual experience - that is, an opportunity to deepen my understanding of the world and my place and rhythm in it. But I took with me on my travels my T-shirt that says: “Wherever you go, There You Are” to remind me that no matter how far I travel, I can’t get away from myself...and so whatever I experience will be added on - or have to come to terms with - what is already part of my life.

 

What exactly have I been doing during my sabbatical - and how will it inform my ministry? Two weeks from today I will speak specifically about the project I took on - which was to understand more about the life of Mavor Moore [who died about 1 1/2 years ago...and who was a Unitarian]; and to read and then choose several of his plays to be offered to Unitarian play-reading groups across Canada. 

 

This project I picked was one that I could do almost anywhere - on a beach, on a plane, in my own living room - anywhere I could get comfortable and read. And I certainly did move around! This morning I will strenuously resist the temptation to tell you everything that happened to me in summary form - thereby making it all appear like footnotes to a rather boring travelogue. Instead I will pick out just a few highlightsthat had spiritual significance.  With each of these highlights I will ask myself the same questions I was asking myself at the time:What is the meaning this experience has for me? How did this experience change/affect/transform my life?  As I am talking I invite you, with one part of your brain, to be thinking about travels you have taken and how they have impacted your life.

 

In Hawaii I returned to an evolutionary conference similar to the one I attended last year. This one was called: “The Evolutionary Epic: Science’s Story and Humanity’s Response” The keynote speaker was Brian Swimme, cosmologist. This time I understood a lot more and there seemed to be a bigger attempt to integrate all attendees into the flow of the conference. This time I was also delivering a paper. It was on the evolution of Angus Bramadat’s family - an evolution that went geographically from India to Trinidad and Tobago to Canada; and religiously from Hindu to Christian to Unitarian. It was a subject that I knew more about than anyone else who was there, and that does inspire a certain amount of confidence! Mind you, there were still questions asked that I could not answer: like” How can you be certain that Angus’s family came from a Brahmin-caste Hindu background? A lot of people pretended that they came from that caste when they didn’t...” Of course I couldn’t be absolutely certain, I could only report what I had observed of the family during the 44 years I shared with Angus....”

 

One of the other participants was a very unassuming quiet man who, when he opened his mouth, transfixed us all.  He was, he is, Drew Dellinger, he was, he is, a spoken word poet; the founder of Poets for Global Justice, a teacher, an activist. Here is one of his poems...

 

Hieroglyphic Stairway

”it’s 3:23 in the morning

and I’m awake

because my great great grandchildren

won’t let me sleep

my great great grandchildren

ask me in dreams

what did you do while the planet was plundered?

what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something

when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, and birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest

when democracy was stolen?

what did you do

once you knew?

I’m riding home on the Colma train

I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I have teams of scientists

feeding me data daily

and pleading I immediately

turn it into poetry

I want just this consciousness reached

by people in range of secret frequencies

contained in my speech

I am the desirous earth

equidistant to the underworld

and the flesh of the stars

I am everything already lost

the moment the universe turns transparent

and all the light shoots through the cosmos

I use words to instigate silence

I’m a hieroglyphic stairway

in a buried Mayan city

suddenly exposed by a hurricane

a satellite circling earth

finding dinosaur bones

in the Gobi desert

I am telescopes that see back in time

I am the precession of the equinoxes,

the magnetism of the spiraling sea

I’m riding home on the Colma train

with the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I am myths where violets blossom from blood

like dying and rising gods

I’m the boundary of time

soul encountering soul

and tongues of fire

it’s 3:23 in the morning

and I’m awake

because my great great grandchildren

won’t let me sleep

  my great great grandchildren

ask me in dreams

what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

I want just this consciousness reached

by people in range of secret frequencies

contained in my speech

drew dellinger”

 

The keynote speaker, Brian Swimme has said of Drew’s poetry:

"The poetry of Drew Dellinger is in the tradition of Walt Whitman with his panoramic eroticism but it's amped up even higher with the electricity from hip hop and the unquenchable passion of a Martin Luther King Jr., and the cosmic serenity of an Albert Einstein. When you're in the mood to have a torch put to your soul, Drew's the man."—Brian Swimme, author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos.

 

If this poetry has moved you at all, I urge you to go on line and listen to Drew speak it.....then it will transfix you too...and buy his book, Love Letter to the Milky Way and don’t misplace it as I’ve done.

 

What meaning did this experience have for me? How did this experience change/affect/transform my life?  I keep hearing in my conscience: “What did you do when the earth was unravelling? What did you do once you knew?” and knowing that my answer is not sufficient to my professed concern, my answer needs to have a torch put to it...I need to be reminded of my responsibility to the larger good. I do not want ‘to lose my dreams in order to protect my days’....so although I know I have much to make up for in my initial response - it is not yet too late to be the best I can be. It is not yet too late to be the best I can be. 

Let me share one other part of my travels. I had a last minute opportunity to go to Machu Picchu and many other places in Peru with a group of Unitarians.(This was one place I did not read Mavor Moore’s plays..) It had been one of my dreams to visit this magical place. And it was indeed magical, but not necessarily for the reasons I thought it would be. Yes, the sight of the 15th Century Machu Picchu city ruins so high in the Andes mountains was mystical and awe-inspiring...but it was the human elements that I remember most of all. 

To give you just one example among many, it was the interpreter, Fidel, who took such precise care to give us as broad and deep an explanation of all the Incan ruins as he could. He made sure that we understood that there were many different interpretations as to what had gone on so many hundreds of years before. It became obvious that this was a people who believed in cooperation and collaboration, who had not left behind a written language or any other easily understandable method of communication. For example they used a series of knots in ropes as a method of communication, but there is no clear explanation of just what the various knots meant.

 

Fidel also made sure that we understood that Machu Picchu, for all its mystery and beauty, was not the centre of the Incan kingdom. Cusco probably was. So we were gently educated about the lost history and the many interpretations that could be made. This applied to the brutal Spanish occupation and also the stories the Spaniards told about the Incas. The word “Inca” means king, or leader and it is possible that the Incas were not a separate ethnic group but simply Quechuans. The language most Peruvians spoke was called ‘Quechua’ from the Cusco province. It is possible that some Peruvians had become knowledgeable and skilful enough to lead other Peruvians...be. their leaders, in other words.

Fidel used a very telling example. He said that there was one picture (he implied only one picture..) of an Inca warrior holding up a head dripping with blood in one hand and a sword in the other hand. This has been used to demonstrate how bloodthirsty and cruel the Incas were. He said imagine if people from the future were to find a porn site from our culture and use it as an example of how corrupt the people of the 20th and 21st Centuries had been....and that that porn site was the only image used to depict how people used to act toward each other. Imagine how that would skew the future’s view of us.

I then found myself thinking of an interesting parallel metaphor. As you may know, many visitors to Peru suffer from “high altitude sickness.” (at one point we were at 11,500 feet above sea-level) In fact two of our tour had to return to Canada and quite of few of us suffered seriously from this sickness. I had a very minor reaction to it that lasted for about 8 hours. I wrote in my journal - ‘I wonder if any of us (and I was definitely thinking of Unitarians...) suffer as well from a “high attitude sickness?” 

 

What I was thinking about is that sometimes we take a viewpoint that our understanding of the world is superior to others; that others have religious superstitions while we have rational discourse that takes care not to give any credence to myths or undocumented stories. That would be a pity indeed, as myths usually contain truths with a capital “T” and undocumented stories are often just stories with incomplete understanding about them, but stories that have woven into them a moral fibre or warning needed in society.

What is the meaning these Peruvian experiences have for me?

 

I was humbled to learn of the expertise with which the Peruvians built their structures so that they withstood the almost daily Andean earthquakes (while the Spanish buildings regularly fell down...) It is still not understood how they achieved this - or why on the other hand, they let a handful of Spanish soldiers take over their whole culture. 

What did these experiences mean to me?

 

They remind me of the complex and often puzzling world in which we live....They compel me to be more careful about interpreting how other people live and even closer to home - to take a good long look at how I choose to live. Does how I live do credit to my culture, to how I want my culture to be perceived?  I can do better. I will do better.

 

What was spiritual, what was all encompassing about my experiences in both these places?  The word spiritual comes from ‘breathing’ - without breathing there is nothing...with breathing all is possible. What was spiritual?  That so much is possible.  In Peru the translation for waiting room is “Sala de Esperanza” the room of hope. Earth still exists...it waits... and we, with all our potential are still on it. All is still possible...there is still hope waiting.

 

What do your travels tell you about how you relate to others? ...about  your own perception of the world?

The impressions I have shared with you from both Hawaii and Peru just touch the surface of an ongoing wonder and joy at how fortunate I am to be alive on such an amazing planet... and a humility that the longer I live, the more I understand I have to learn. I’m going to need at least several more lifetimes to figure it all out. So I’d better not waste any more time talking. 

But while I’m off pondering and learning, I beg you...do not lose your dreams to protect your days.