READING
In his book, The Way of the Earth, Catholic theologian John S. Dunne, tells a story of pilgrimage and homecoming that he calls “The Parable of the Mountain.” I recast it in my forthcoming book, Bringing God Home, in a passage IÕd like to share with you as our reading for the morning.
One day a group of seekers begins to climb a mountain. Having been told that God lives at the top of it, they jettison their daily cares and leave them in the valley below. Climbing into the clouds on a quest for perfect wisdom, they follow the official signs that point to God: transcendent, all knowing, all-powerful.
Finally, they reach the mountaintop. From the mountainÕs crest, they can see farther than they have ever seen before. And the air is thin at the top of the mountain. This rarefied atmosphere promotes abstract and disembodied reflection on the eternal verities, which are confounded and veiled by the grossness, busyness and squalor of life below. There is only one problem. God is not there. It seems that while they were climbing up the mountain in search of God, God was climbing down the mountain into the valley.
How can this be? Perhaps because God seeks us as eagerly as we seek God. In poet Gwendolyn BrooksÕ words:
PerhapsÑwho knows? ÑHe tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.
As earth-bound pilgrims dream to escape their human lot, desiring transfiguration into something immortal and divine, perhaps GodÕs hope is to embrace humanity, to become incarnate in mortal flesh and thus escape the everlasting emptiness of eternity.
If we climb up as God comes down, each to the other is like a vanishing pot of gold at the two ends of a rainbow. The mystery is, by reaching for GodÑfor a divine hand that turns out not to be thereÑwe may in fact be changed, even saved. Searching for ourselves, we remember that until we are lost we cannot be found. Struggling for meaning, we recognize that until we are empty we cannot be filled. Seeking something in our lives that will abide, we awaken to the astonishing fact that only those things that we have given away can ever truly be ours.
When asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom was coming, Jesus himself says, "The Kingdom is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you."
Think of little things. Reaching out for the touch of a loved oneÕs hand. Shared laughter. A letter to a lost friend. An undistracted hour of silence, alone, together with our thoughts until there are no thoughts, only the pulse of life itself. Imagine an afternoon spent free from worry about the things we have to do, or an afternoon tackling tasks we have avoided. Both may be somehow easier now, for we have been to the mountain. Though God was not there, upon returning home, if we look very closely, we too may discover that all has been touched by grace. God has returned to the mountaintop, but here in the valley below we follow for a blessed time in GodÕs footsteps. The very ground we walk is Holy land. We may not understand any better than before who we are or why we are here. But for this fleeting momentÑthe one moment we can bank onÑour life becomes a sacrament of praise.
SERMON
Next to “Home sweet home,” which in cross-stitch and needlepoint adorns so many homespun icons, no domestic adage is more familiar than “ThereÕs no place like home.” Its source is the libretto of John Howard PayneÕs all-but-forgotten operetta, “Clari, the Maid of Milan,” from a song titled—appropriately enough—“Home Sweet Home.” The complete couplet reads as follows:
ÔMid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble, thereÕs no place like home.
I can certainly subscribe to this. From my tiniest studio apartment to our present parsonage, I have loved something about every one of my many homes. I counted them up recently. Typical of todayÕs peripatetic Americans, over my fifty-odd years I have resided for six months or more in twenty different dwelling places: three in Idaho; one in Washington, D. C.; one in Bethesda, Maryland; four in Stanford, Woodside and Los Altos, California; three in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts; one in Hanover, New Hampshire; and six in New York City. For the past decade, my family has been blessed with a second home as well, in Shelter Island, New York, with a lighthouse in the distance and beyond it the open sea.
One reason there is no place like home is that no place is more completely ours. Some say that we are what we eat. More aptly, we are what we keep. The amalgam of belongings we collect and display at home both illustrates our past and presents it as a composite work in progress, as unique as individual identity itself is, each of our lives a living canvass layered with patinas of memory. Yet there is another part to the saying: "Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home."
I think of poet George HerbertÕs quest for more capacious lodgings in which to house his soul. “Not thriving,” he determined to cancel his present lease and seek a finer residence. First he looked to Heaven. As in the Parable of the Mountain, when he got up there he discovered that God had gone down to earth “about some land, which he had dearly bought . . . to take possession.”
I straight returnÕd, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.
HerbertÕs poem suggests not only that God is where we might last think to look, but also that to find what we are looking for we neednÕt search in fine precincts or distant lands. “Home is where the heart is,” the scriptures remind us. If God is love, then GodÕs home is where our heart is.
Many of us have recently returned from vacation. Now we are home to begin another year. For the year does begin in September. Summer ends, school begins, work kicks in again in earnest. Here at All Souls too, we begin anew in September. We begin inscribing another years notes into the Book of our life together. To celebrate another homecoming, this morning I want to muse a bit about vacations, what we are looking for when we go on them, and how the most important of those things can be found right here at home, if only we knew where and how to find them.
Often we donÕt. Remember how as a child you would long for the coming of summer vacation? By February, the very thought of summer was so sweet you could almost taste it. Summer meant freedom: freedom from school; freedom from indoors; in my case, even freedom from my parents for a few choice weeks. How I would pray for summer to come. When finally it arrived, though I can recall many good things about summer, I also remember the disappointment I felt while sitting with my best friend Jimmy Bruce on the stoop of my grandparentsÕ house on Idaho Street in Boise almost any midsummerÕs day.
“Do you want to play baseball?”
“Nah, I'm tired of playing baseball.”
“So am I.”
“We could play soldiers, but we did that yesterday.”
“How about Monopoly?”
“It takes too long.”
And so we sat, plumped up in the very lap of summer, bored to tears, nothing to do, no responsibilities, free as birds but with nowhere to fly. Two little boys sighing on the stoop, we were budding existentialists weighed down by the burden of time on our hands and the freedom to do with it what we would. We could have done anything we wanted, but couldn't find anything we wished to do. And then we grew upÑstill tempted to do only what we wanted to do, give just what we felt like giving, and go only where we cared to go. We called this freedom.
Vacation is a synonym for freedom. And given that we often canÕt find what we are looking for at home, itÕs no surprise that when we do take a vacation, most of us like to "go away." Part of it has to do with escape. When we leave town, we break free from the grind of everyday routine, shelving in the back of our minds those forever self-replenishing "to-do-today" lists, guilt-inducing reminders of unfulfilled good intentions and unfinished business.
Note that the words “routine” and “rut” share the same root. Daily routines invest our lives with coherence. To this extent, we should cherish them as a hedge against chaos. Fulfilling everyday obligations invests our lives with purpose and gives them a recognizable shape. Just as it is sometimes easier to accomplish ten things in a day than only one, the more organized our lives are the more productive and predictably satisfying they are likely to be. Nonetheless, that which contains our lives can as easily constrain them. Apart from things such as daily devotions (for those who meditate or pray), repetition of most other actions becomes stultifying; it numbs the mind. We can even get into a rut with our prayers. For all these reasons, a vacation away can be liberating. When we stay in town instead, our week will not be free from household chores, e-mail, bills, phone calls, and appointments. Time off at home rarely constitutes a real vacation, one that disencumbers our lives by freeing them from familiar distractions.
Cynics may dispute this. "What an odd thing tourism is," the travel writer Bill Bryson observes. "You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldnÕt have lost if you hadnÕt left home in the first place." I admit, a few of my own vacations flirt with inclusion in this category. Happily, most do not. Simply by breaking our customary regimen, even frivolous vacations can serve a spiritual purpose, if only a modest one.
Besides, we donÕt "go away" on vacation merely to escape. We also travel in hopes of discovering something missing from our everyday lives. If shedding daily cares liberates us from routine fretfulness, traveling also expands our horizons. When motivated by a desire for significant experience, we journey in search of the eventful or extraordinary. For instance, I took my family on vacation to Egypt recently. As happy as I was to escape the responsibilities of home, far more enticing was the prospect of intellectual or, better, spiritual adventure. Putting aside such memorable moments as when a shopkeeper (in jest) offered me a hundred camels in exchange for my then sixteen-year-old daughter, everyone in the family discovered that it is almost impossible to visit the pyramids without coming away with a heightened sense of humility and awe. We embarked with the expectation of expanding our experience of human history and destiny. In neither case were we disappointed.
However, should we expect too much from a vacation, our expectations will rarely be met. This truth particularly holds for ambitious travel, when a difficult journey is coupled with a lofty, life-transforming goal. The African explorer James Bruce offers evidence for this in his book, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, written in 1790. In his own travels through Egypt, upon fulfilling his lifelong dream by discovering what he believes to be the fountainhead of the Nile River, Bruce is not elated but strangely depressed. “I was, at that very moment, in possession of what had, for many years, been the principal object of my ambition and wishes,” he writes. “Indifference, which from the usual infirmity of human nature follows, at least for a time, complete enjoyment, had taken place of it. The marsh, and the fountains, upon comparison with the rise of many of our rivers, became now a trifling object in my sight.” He thinks back on the rivers of EnglandÑrecollecting them as being in no way inferior to the Nile in beautyÑand dismisses his quest as “a violent effort of a distempered fancy.”
In his best-remembered admonition, Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us to be careful what we pray for, because we may get it. His warning stems from the human tendency to want only what we do not have. When we get what we pray for, stripped of its mystery it may lose its appeal. By the same token, whether with respect to vacations or to spiritual quests, our risk of disappointment will bear a direct relationship to the misplacement of our expectations.
One who discovered his heartÕs desire near at hand after seeking "heaven" elsewhere is the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In his travelogue of the soul, “The Prelude,” Wordsworth blames unrealistically high expectations for his deflating experience upon reaching Simplon Pass in the Swiss Alps, the ostensible “high point” of his 1790 tour through Europe. As for Bruce, the reality of WordsworthÕs experience paled in contrast to his imagined vision, which “hides it like the overflowing Nile.” BruceÕs Nile is the goal that disappoints upon our attainment of it; WordsworthÕs Nile is a perfect vision that floods reality once we actually experience it. It was only upon returning to his familiar haunts that Wordsworth
. . . shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever, and again
In NatureÕs presence stood, as now I stand,
A sensitive being, a creative soul.
As Wordsworth rediscovered, by expecting to find elsewhere what is missing from our daily lives, we overlook the divine within the familiar. Casting our hopes into the future, rather than being expectant of the present, we miss perceiving what he called “the kindred points of heaven and home.”
If the repetitive nature of our everyday activities has placed us on automatic pilot, breaking this pattern can pay dividends. Nonetheless, despite the potential advantages of escape (getting out of our ruts) and adventure (discovering new things), the NileÑor whatever destination we set our hearts onÑis no better a metaphor for success in the spiritual journey than is the proverbial pot of gold at the rainbowÕs end. Escape fantasies only promote the belief that our dreams of fulfillment cannot be met right here and now. That we must look elsewhere first to discover this belief to be false, makes it no more true.
For Wordsworth, imagination is the secret to spiritual fulfillment, not imagination as fantasy, but imagination as insight. Though our lives may be going smoothly, we may still dwell in disquietude, sensing the absence of what we have at our fingertips, not fulfilled by its presence. Whether seeking freedom, fleeing boredom, or both, we run away whenever our imaginations betray us.
Discontent stirs the imagination to range widely and sometimes wildly in the quest for inner peace. And yet, as Walt Whitman (the most present-minded of poets) is ever ready to remind us, everything we could possibly hope for in life is right before our eyes.
Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding also the sweetest and strongest and lovingest,
Happiness not in another place, but this place . . . not for another hour, but this hour.
Though
as simple a truth as any in life, this is one lesson that I have to keep relearning.
But I mustnÕt be too hard on myself. By one derivation, the word "experience"
means "out of peril." What experience has taught me is that sometimes the only
way to ensure a safe homecoming is by wandering for a time. Sometimes we wander
far away. Sometimes we wander in place. But when we return, we return to discover
homeÕs true sweetness. Once again we remember that home is where the heart is.
Welcome home.