A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

December 5, 2004


There's a particular kind of anxiety to a journey. I like it fine once I get there, Scottish seaports and mountains, Kew Gardens, the Victoria Embankment — but what a bother it is to get there. To contemplate the airports and getting to them and the security and the microscopic seats — puts me of a mind to wonder why I'd ever leave home.

There's hardly a more fundamental image in the dreams of people, or in our mythology and scriptures, than this image of a journey. The story of a pilgrim people is our story.

Whether it's the restless and driven like Arthur Miller's salesman, who is always seeking a gold mine in Alaska or, more nobly, countless seekers after God or Destiny, the purpose and End of life, — whether it's St. Paul writing

or the mysterious New Testament Book of Hebrews saying

or whether it's Brendan, the Brendan of J.R.R. Tolkien's poem "The Death of Brendan," who looks over grey waves straining for something out there, who journeys unknown roads and finds a great mountain rising out of the sea and wreathed in fire, yet rows on beyond even that; like Moses climbing that mountain and seeing the rocky path before him vanishing in flame which he himself will enter — like them, we are drawn onward. There is more than bother to this journey. There is a necessity, and there is a thrill.

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Ours is a religious vision that perceives this roaring Universe of Life as unfolding. We don't proclaim a standing-still universe that doesn't change, or a changeless forever understanding of Truth, or a once-and-for-all Revelation. Our lives are a journey, and Life is a journey.

But we ache, we get tired, on this long human journey. And we are afraid. We know how much can go wrong. And so we dream, sometimes quite unrealistically, of where we started, a glorious golden magical past.

Which brings to mind those journeyers in the ancient Exodus story. They had set out on a journey and now they are wondering what they ever did that for.

They're following Moses and kvetching at him, yeh, but really that's not it. It's something inside them, some seed of destiny that makes them journey. So even though they complain, they walk on. There's nothing else you can do.

They were slaves, but they knew they were more than that. Something inside them told them they were more.

That something is the same something that spoke in the Indian seer Sri Aurobindo, whofds died in 1950. He said that the appearance of humans in a material and animal world was

and he compared this human unfolding — from the most primitive state to the most sublime — to the difference between a "chained slave" and the "emerging . . . disk of a secret sun."

Man is himself a little more than an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him . . . This cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature. There is something beyond, something that [human]kind shall be; it is seen now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of limitations. . . .1

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Those Exodus tribes forgot where they were going. Of course they never really knew, because they hadn't seen it yet. But they forgot the call, they forgot the promise, they forgot the necessity. They remembered only where they had been.

Why do we forget and lose our way?

Because, like the Exodus tribes, we recognize ourselves simply and solely as our past. And the answer to the question of our identity, or "Who am I?", becomes most often for us nothing more than an abstraction from memory, since what I know of myself is mostly always what I was.

But an identity based only on memory is only tracks and echoes from which the great energies of life has vanished.

We forget — like the Exodus tribes — forget what calls us forward, forget this place to which we're going, which we've never seen but only dreamed, because we're afraid of the journey.

And you know, we make up our memories as we go. So we remember where we came from somewhat differently than the way it really was.

In the place they came from, they had all the bread and water they could eat! They were provided with activities to do. They could make bricks. It was orderly. You could depend on it.

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How we glorify the past. It shows up in the romantic way we look at our children.

There is, you know, an old Romantic notion about children — that they start life in some blissful state of union with the Divine Ground of Being and then eventually the child's self differentiates itself and this wonderful spiritual union is lost, and cut off from the Ground of Being. And then later, perhaps, in adulthood, the self can "get spirituality" by making a spiritual U-turn in development, back to that original magical state of union with the Universe.2

But that's not what it is to be an infant or a child — some blissful state of divine union! Don't you remember? But of course, you don't remember.

The infant self is relatively peaceful, not because it's living in Heaven, but because it isn't yet aware that there's also some hell out there.

An infant is really already immersed in samsara, as the Buddhists call it — it just doesn't know it yet. To become enlightened is way different from returning to an infant state!

Gradually that infant self will be introduced to the first Noble Truth of the Buddha, that there is suffering in this life, and desire that cannot be quenched. Maybe he or she will spend their entire life in this desperate quest for anything that will numb the raw and ragged feelings, blur the despair.

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But there is something else that can happen. Maybe you pursue the spiritual quest, the real object of this journey. Your life-journey leads you beyond the isolation of a separate-self.

That's the day you see the mountain wreathed in fire. It simply shows up one day along the journey — flaring forth in your consciousness in a brilliant burst of illumination and a shock of the unspeakably ordinary: and you have seen the fire on the mountain, and recognized your oneness with the Divine Life of All that you cannot sever or lose however far you journey.

There is a blaze of enlightened comprehension: Everything that is — is always, already one with the Ground of all being, which is every inch of your journey! To lose oneness with that Ground is to cease to exist. You cannot sever or lose your oneness with the Divine Life of All. It takes consciousness, a finer, higher consciousness, to know it.

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In the development of a new human life even still in the womb, it is as though the entire sweep of human evolution is represented in every child's growth.

A few billion years of evolution played out in fast-forward in the development of every one of us. There is more to come. There is more truth, and a higher consciousness, to come.

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So then. Why do we look to the past as better, more brilliant and wise and pure?

Here is one reason. We have a problem believing that this human journey is heading anywhere good. We aren't so sure about the ascent toward Spirit that the great spiritual traditions proclaim. At first glance we cannot put it together: how can we account for Auschwitz and pointless wars and greed and ecocide?

But the ugliest human impulses are not new; they're not modern inventions. They're a holdover from a more primitive time. It's just that now they're powered by new human capacities and powers. You cannot wipe out a continent and destroy whole cities with bows and arrows. But the ugly impulses are not new. Let us not glorify the past. We shouldn't think that the modern world is just a sorry spiritual production compared with, say, ancient Mesopotamia, when the whole world was supposed to bow to some mythic deity, the temples were built upon the broken backs of millions of enslaved and tortured humans.3 This world of life has more unfolding to do and so do we. We are not here to perpetuate what Ken Wilbur calls the "preposterous groveling at any doctrine whose only authority comes from the fact that it was uttered by a really really ancient sage, centuries or preferably millennia ago."2

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Don't sing "Give me that old time religion" to me, because it isn't good enough for us, or for our world.

Yes, there is an ancient perenniel wisdom that is timeless, spaceless, formless Truth, not bound to any time or place. But it, too, must unfold. It, too, is a journey.

And what we are must be more than a has-been identity. We must believe in our own becoming; in each others' becoming. Here's the trouble with looking back. Time doesn't flow forward from a creator who made the world; it flows forward toward a power that makes the world.


but toward an Omega, the object of our quest. We are a part of that power.

I don't need that old-time religion,

We are greater than our past but that scares us.

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Yet here we are — our lives the result of the material given, what we have been and what we have done, mixed with the passions and dreams and force of character that drive us — and the journey calls us on, and evokes all that in us, and it draws from the hidden dreams and undiscovered powers within us — to become the people this new world requires.

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Oh, there is plenty that can go wrong.

There is something else striking about the Exodus story. The Exodus journeyers found out that you cannot get to the promised land without passing through some wilderness. There are wilderness periods in human history and there are wilderness patches in our lives. There are times of struggle between what was and can be no more, and what is to be but is not yet, and there you are, and it hurts.

You cannot get from the small stifling past to the wide radiant future without going through the wilderness, that place of nothingness and void and darkness where the accustomed things from the past where you have come from — are forgotten because they are no more, but the new life, the bold future, doesn't yet appear. All birthing takes place in such places.

These journeyers forgot where they were going. All they could think of was where they had been. They got stuck in that wilderness in between. It doesn't take 40 years to get across that wilderness, but that is how long they wandered there. They wandered until all those who remembered the past and couldn't let go of it — were gone, before they could move on.

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But for those willing to see it, every new turn in their journey taught them more about the Great Energy that led them. Finally they trusted the journey itself and let it lead them home. They came to trust the energies and powers at work in their experience. They trusted their experience and every new turn was a revelation. Wherever they went was new. Nothing could ever be quite the same again.

But how they tried to make it the same! They were tired and afraid. The old and familiar was easy to remember.

And eventually we can come to trust what it is that moves us and calls us and is at work in our experience. You can come to understand, really understand, that every new turn is a revelation, and that wherever you go is new.

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We are carried forward by an inward necessity.

We have an exodus to make, out of whatever captivities we know, from the expectations of a society that is too small for our love and our vision, from religious institutions that took fright to the journey long ago and got lost in the wilderness and wandered back to the old kingdom and dispensation because they're afraid of the journey. That is our America today, governed by the faith of a past and alien time. And listen. We are called to question a world and shake up powerful and outmoded religious kingdoms that have become afraid of the journey. We stand at a crossroads of human history. We will have to keep our eyes on the shining goal. Ken Wilber writes:

We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, . . . and thus is always going beyond what went before — that leaps, now crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, and often stumbling and bruising its metaphysical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.

and Wilbur invites us:

"to see the same currents running through our human blood that run through swirling galaxies and colossal solar systems,

that crash through the great oceans and course through our own veins, that move the mightiest of mountains as well as our own glorious moral aspirations —

one and the same current moves throughout the All . . .5

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And this journey gives us very great gifts. It gives us ourselves, and it gives us each other.

It is in you and

To you:


There is more.


1 From The Hour of God, pp. 7-12.
2 See Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit. Boston: Shambhala, 1997, pp. 57ff.
3 Wilbur, 75f.
4 Wilbur, 66.
5 Wilbur, 79.


Meditation


In quiet expectancy
Yet with fears
We gather today.

The way ahead of us is long
But we are drawn forward into a future to be maded
Into a place we have not seen
That must be believed to be seen

And in our hearts we believe that fear can cease
And the bitter fruit of greed
And the language of cruel hate
The noxious noise of war
And the presumed privilege of the powerful

About us is great wrong
The breaking heart
The despair of the powerless
The hope that lies in tatters

And around us is hope and strength and great light
Around us in this Great Hall in the hearts of these who gather
Feel the strength; know the hope
Walk on
Leaving behind what must be left, laying aside


Readings


From the book of Exodus

And the Lord by a strong hand brought them out of Egypt.

They set out and came to the wilderness of Sin, between Elim and Sinai. And the whole congregation of the people murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and said to them, "Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill us with hunger."

And they moved on and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore the people found fault with Moses and murmured against him, and said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and cattle with thirst?"

But the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night; the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.


From the conclusion of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again

I believe that we are lost her in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me — and I think for all of us — not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us . . . was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live. . . .

I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, . . . is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. . . .

I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. . . . I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, . . . took our bread and left us with a crust, . . . for the nature of the enemy is insatiate . . . .

Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year . . .

"To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth —

"—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending — a wind is rising, and the rivers flow."