No Maps

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
February 15, 2004

Reading:
From The Measure of My Days, by Florida Scott-Maxwell

Life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness. Some uncomprehended law holds us at a point of contradiction where we have no choice, where we do not like that which we love, where good and bad are inseparable partners impossible to tell apart, and where we—heart-broken and ecstatic, can only resolve the conflict by blindly taking it into our hearts. This used to be called being in the hands of God. Has anyone any better words to describe it?

Sermon:

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson commissioned the first overland exploration over the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean. In 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition launched from Saint Louis. The plan was to follow the Missouri River upstream to its beginning, at which point, it was figured it would be a short distance to a river that would take the party downstream to the Pacific Ocean. Because this group of twenty-five men had no engines, the crew paddled their supplies-laden canoes upstream. When the river was too difficult to navigate, they took to the land and carried their canoes and supplies. It was slow going. In seven months time, they only made it to Fort Mandan, at the center of present-day North Dakota, before they settled down for a very cold winter. After heading off after the thaw, the difficulty of navigating upstream was the least of their worries.

They were relying on mere hearsay about what lay ahead. From the native peoples they knew the major landmarks they would find, culminating with a grand set of waterfalls at which point they would go by land across the continental divide. But one afternoon, as Stephen Ambrose tells the story in Undaunted Courage, they came to a fork in the river that left them completely uncertain which way to go. The right-hand fork headed west for the mountains. Although it was deeper than the left fork it was considerably less wide. The left-hand fork came in from the southwest but its current was swifter. While the north fork ran in “the same boiling and roling manner,” the south fork was smooth. Nearly the entire crew believed to take the right-hand fork or north fork and besides it was more turbid with whitish brown mud also characteristic of the Missouri. Lewis noted that the south was perfectly transparent, thereby concluding it came directly from the mountains. Uncertain what to do, he sent scouts up both. The southwest fork was reported to continue southwest, where as the right-hand fork after ten miles to the west turned north. Neither one sounded right.

Faced with such a decision what would you do? How would you decide to go the left or to the right? What would you want to know? Lewis and Clark decided to split the expedition to explore the two forks. Clark headed up the left-hand fork and Lewis up the right-hand fork. After three days journey, the left-hand fork continued in a southwest direction and never reached a waterfall. Clark returned to the fork far sooner than Lewis’s group, because the right-hand river was difficult to navigate and after it turned north, it continued north and further north. They never reached a waterfall either.

When Lewis finally returned to meet Clark, virtually all the men were convinced that the north fork was the true Missouri River, the correct path. Lewis and Clark, however, disagreed. Because they were in charge, the group pushed on up the south fork heading for several days to the southwest before reaching the legendary waterfall. If they had gone to the right, the expedition would have taken the Marias River which would have ended their trek in Glacier National Park, certainly preventing them from going much further.

As it was, the expedition had no idea huge mountains were in their path until they had to cross the Rocky Mountains of southern Idaho and then descend down the treacherous Columbia River that is the modern day border between Oregon and Washington.

For most of us, the decisions we make during own life journeys may not be as vivid and clear-cut as those Lewis and Clark made in the face of uncertainty. But there is one very clear similarity. In many of life’s difficult moments, there are no maps to guide us. There are times when we must make an important decision and the path is far from clear. We must assess our own situation with clarity, use our own critical inquiry and gut feelings, to discern the right path. We often must make the best guesses we can over ethical dilemmas with nothing but our conscience to guide us. And it is not uncommon to wonder whether one has made the wrong choice or taken the wrong path.

For many of us, it is far from clear to what we are called in our lives. Parker Palmer is a contemporary Quaker writer who has struggled with how to live authentically in a world of uncertainty. From Let Your Life Speak, he writes:

If I were ever to discover a new direction, I thought, it would be at Pendle Hill, a community rooted in prayer, study, and a vision of human possibility. But when I arrived and started sharing my vocational quandary, people responded with a traditional Quaker counsel that, despite their good intentions, left me even more discouraged. “Have faith,” they said, “and way will open.”

“I have faith,” I thought to myself. “What I don’t have is time to wait for ‘way’ to open. I’m approaching middle age at warp speed, and I have yet to find a vocational path that feels right. The only way that’s opened so far is the wrong way.”

After a few months of deepening frustration, I took my troubles to an older Quaker woman well known for her thoughtfulness and candor. “Ruth,” I said, “people keep telling me that ‘way will open.’ Well, I sit in the silence, I pray, I listen for my calling, but way is not opening. I’ve been trying to find my vocation for a long time, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m meant to do. Way may open for other people, but it’s sure not opening for me.”

Ruth’s reply was a model of Quaker plain-speaking. “I’m a birthright Friend,” she said somberly, “and in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me.” She paused, and I started sinking into despair. Was this wise woman telling me that the Quaker concept of God’s guidance is a hoax?

Then she spoke again, this time with a grin. “But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”

So often I hear thoughtful people express the pain and anguish that comes with needing to blaze their own trail and create their own path. I empathize with women who had no adequate maps for them in a world dominated by men. Carol Gilligan, in her groundbreaking book, In A Different Voice, demonstrates how theories of moral reasoning up until her work in the 1980s took no account of women’s experience. When I was a chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital, I became acquainted with two transgender people who had been beaten up, and they expressed a longing to be who they feel called to be while also expressing despair that they have no role models, no clear paths, and certainly no maps. I have walked with couples, both straight and gay, who want help in identifying how to ritually mark what is most important to them in their relationship within a ceremony of union. In a sense, every person must find their own way in a world that offers all sorts of maps, but none of them necessarily appropriate for any unique individual. Perhaps that is what being human is all about, finding our way accompanied with all the joy and sorrow that this quest brings forth.

As Piet Hein, a Danish poet and renaissance man that resisted the Nazis, writes in his book Grooks, “There are no clear maps, no straight lines. Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.”

All of us must at points in our lives journey through unfamiliar territory. Sometimes such times are thrust upon us without warning. Other times we find that we have gradually waded into a life situation to which we are not sure how to resolve. The uncertainty we bear is not our enemy. Our enemy is our propensity to be distracted from seeking clarity and our propensity to pretend that we know more than we do.

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that as a leader it is better to appear as if I know everything rather than acknowledge where I am uncertain. I remember vividly when I was preparing for the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, the MFC, the national body that accredits ministers in our faith tradition. The meeting with the MFC consists of an hour interview, beginning with a ten minute sermon. Even though I was a strong candidate, I was freaked out that seven people I didn’t know would determine whether I could go into search for a church of my own. I arranged with some colleagues in central Massachusetts for a mock-interview two weeks prior to my MFC appointment. For my sermon, I included a reading that sounded especially learned. I tweaked and twisted it so as to puff myself up. I broke every rule of good sermon-writing. When the time came for the mock MFC, I gave the worst sermon I have ever delivered. My mentor, Rev. Barbara Merritt, said in front of the others to help me save face, “Alan, you haven’t ever preached so poorly.” It was humiliating. I realized I had pretended to be something I was not. I sought to mask over who I was. And I tacitly denied the wisdom that I have to offer. Realizing my error, I wrote a sermon on being lost. I came to understand that being lost is a natural part of the human journey, and that there ever beckons deep within us the longing to return to the true path.

The spiritual journey is one that has no maps. There are guides and helpful pointers, sacred scriptures and moral teachings, but ultimately, the individual must choose for oneself which path to take. At the core of human existence is the freedom to choose one’s own path, whether or not one exercises that freedom. For many people settle for someone else’s map, deciding to put their faith in another’s judgment. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is not unusual for human beings to determine a particular map to be especially useful, but it becomes untenable when human beings insist that one specific map is the only viable one. For such insistence loses sight of the human freedom for each individual to decide where to put one’s faith.

Here at Unity Temple, we don’t seek to instill specific answers to life’s religious questions. We instead seek to create an environment where children and adults can inquire freely and forge their own answers. While we believe there is a very real difference between right and wrong, we don’t seek to tell people what specifically is right or wrong but instead seek to offer an ethical framework from which our young people (and older ones) can develop their own moral reasoning. In other words, we strive to help people live with the uncertainty that fills our lives and world, to help people cultivate their own maps. Ultimately, there is no one but you who can determine the direction toward which you are called.

One of our new members shared with me that although deciding to become a member was a big decision, the act of becoming a member is small compared with the challenge now facing her of being a member. While it was a big deal to say yes to the responsibilities of membership, she knows that attending to her own spiritual life as well as being involved in the wider community take sustained commitment. Her comment reminded me of a common teaching among sages and gurus: that reaching enlightenment is not the chief goal of the spiritual journey nor the most difficult one, but that carrying on after one is enlightened takes ever more effort and clarity. The Buddhist tradition speaks of the Bodhisattva ideal, where enlightened beings choose not to escape the world but instead immerse themselves in it for the sake of helping others. Such traditions seek to teach people how to move with skillful means through a world filled with uncertainty. Spiritual practice is the vehicle.

The phrase, spiritual practices, may conjure up notions of wu-wu New Age religion that disturbs the sensibilities of the thoughtful religious seeker as the fantasy-like claims of literal interpretations of Christianity. When I refer to spiritual practice, I am talking about disciplines that cultivate what the Buddhists call “skillful means.” The goal of spiritual practice has nothing to do with escaping the pain and suffering of life but instead to cope and cultivate clarity and move toward wholeness, both personal and global.

It’s tempting to think only of meditation, contemplative prayer, and yoga as spiritual practices. They are among the most rigorous, but there are many others. What goes into a spiritual practice? An activity that focuses our attention, making space for clearness of intention, an activity that one engages in daily, regardless whether one feels like doing it or not. It may be walking, crocheting, or working on cars. If one engages in the activity with full attention, allows the mind to quiet, and makes a discipline of the work, I deem it a spiritual practice. From conversations with parents, taking care of a baby is an especially demanding spiritual practice, calling one to overcome ego and frustration for the sake of cultivating the skillful means of another human being.

Waking up to truth and the heart of reality can bring great joy and clarity, but it also brings great responsibility to live with the consequences of seeing clearly. Martin Buber put it succinctly, “All actual life is encounter.” I would add that all genuine encounter challenges the maps by which we navigate our lives. So all actual life calls us to show up without over-reliance on our own maps. Spiritual practice is any discipline that cultivates our inner life to genuinely engage the world, to show up for actual life.

When finding oneself in unfamiliar territory, remember uncertainty will never be your undoing. However, inability to find clarity in the midst of uncertainty causes one to spin in circles, preventing meaningful growth. That is why spiritual practice is so important in today’s world. Uncertainty calls for clarity. Strive to be clear even when you are not certain. Once decisions are made, move forward. If a decision proves to be wrong, own it. You will survive a few bad decisions. But lack of clarity will lead you nowhere.

Of all the impressive images in Lewis and Clark’s peril-laden expedition, one that will always stay with me is that of the expedition taking their canoes over the Columbia River rapids, rapids that today would be classified class five, meaning such rapids should not be run by modern day canoes designed especially for whitewater. Today this run is underwater due to a dam.

With hundreds of native Americans watching, certain they wouldn’t make it, several weary men headed down a treacherous slope of rocks and churning water, with absolutely no idea how they would manage. They could have just as easily been on their way to plunging into roaring rapids with certain death, or they could find themselves on to smoother waters that would take them to the Pacific Ocean. They didn’t know. And neither do we know what our days will bring us. But if you’re here, you’ve signed up for an adventure. It is completely natural to be uncertain, even suspicious. As my mentor Barbara Merritt shares with the First Unitarian Church of Worcester, “There are no guarantees. But human history tells us that if you follow what you have found to be most true, most trustworthy, and most loving, at the end you will have no regrets. And with grace and enormous effort you will find your way home.”

May it be so.

Amen.

 

© Copyright 2004 Alan C. Taylor, All Rights Reserved.