Horse Latitudes

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
April 3, 2005

First Reading:
by Jelaluddin Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. 

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want. 

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

Second Reading:
from Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot-soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You find yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

 

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

 

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

Sermon:

Are there times in your life when there seems to be no wind in your sails, and you feel like you’re drifting aimlessly, that no matter the effort exerted to move in a certain direction, a strong sense haunts that the direction is random or arbitrary? John Lennon, in his song “How” from the album Imagine, poignantly asks:

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?
How can I go forward when I don't know which way to turn?
How can I go forward into something I'm not sure of?

Those are the questions of the horse latitudes of the soul. What are the horse latitudes? Before the invention of the engine, ships crossed oceans with only the wind to power them. When traveling between the northern and southern hemispheres, sailors always dreaded the places where the wind simply stopped for days on end. They called such places where ships stood still the horse latitudes. The phenomenon of a perfectly quiet climate occurs in certain parts of the globe due to ocean temperatures. I’ve come across two explanations for the phrase ‘horse latitudes’. First, at such times food became scarce and sailors killed horses to eat them. Second, in the hopes of getting the ship more likely to move, horses were thrown overboard. Either way, the evocative label denotes a dreaded place of getting stuck in a place because there is no wind in one’s sails.

I certainly know this place, and I have come to know it well over time. This is a part of the human condition. If you dare follow your own convictions or conscience, there are inevitably times of duress and uncertainty. The horse latitudes are a natural part of the human journey. It is common, and I’d argue even healthy, that the human soul periodically finds itself adrift, disconnected from one’s passion and inner resources. Although there is a peril of getting stuck, there is much to be learned in this dreaded yet all too human place. As long as we don’t simply go back to sleep, there is always a gift to be found in the unwanted stillness of uncertainty.

Life of Pi, the novel by Yann Martel from which I took today’s second reading, tells the story of Piscine Molitar Patel, a sixteen-year-old boy who goes by the name Pi. Pi is a refreshingly receptive teenager who cultivates a faith in Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Through the horrible circumstances of a sinking ship, Pi loses his family and is the only human survivor. But he is not alone. Sharing the sixteen-foot lifeboat is a 450 pound Bengal Tiger from his father’s former zoo whom Pi had previously named Richard Parker. The bulk of the novel takes place on this lifeboat following the story how Pi survives and keeps both himself and Richard Parker alive. For 227 days, the lifeboat is adrift. It’s far from a cute and cuddly story about a boy and his pet kitty. It is instead an engaging and dangerous and intriguing story about faith and survival. At first there are a few other animal survivors, but one by one they become tiger food. At times sharks swim underneath the raft, so Pi must stay alert with danger both below and on the boat, all the while dealing with the grief of losing his entire family. At one point, Pi plots to get rid of Richard Parker, wishing that he never had saved him, for it was Pi who originally saw the tiger swimming, called to him, and made it possible for the beast to enter the lifeboat, which he realized just a second too late what exactly he was doing. But Pi discovers that without the Royal Bengal Tiger in his boat and all the danger that this entails, he wouldn’t have the determination and courage he needs to take one day after the other. Richard Parker’s presence is what makes it possible for Pi to survive his ordeal. Neither one of them would have survived without the other.

The novel, Life of Pi, is an extraordinary exploration of fear, facing up to it, wrestling with it, and ultimately transcending it without getting rid of it. Pi creatively uses the resources in the lifeboat to keep himself alive and realizes that his greatest enemy isn’t the tiger but his fear of the tiger. I imagine that most of us here today have a tiger within our own lives, something that threatens to consume us whether that is a chronic disease or a life threatening one; a rebellious teenager, an impaired parent, or a special needs child; a difficult life partnership or one that has failed; an all-consuming job or the lack of any job. The tiger in your boat is anything that prevents you from living in full authenticity. So your tiger could be an abusive relationship, a deep depression, an addiction, or an obsession that imprisons you in your own thoughts and emotions. It could even be a spiritual struggle leading to the dark night of the soul. What is the tiger in your boat? Do you look fear of your tiger in the eye, keeping it at bay, preventing it from consuming you? Are you creatively making use of the resources in your midst? Or does your fear prevent you from accessing them? Do you always have the command of your own lifecraft, navigating into and through the fear that fuels your anxieties? Or do you, like me, sometimes turn your back on your fear, only to find yourself weakened and wandering, having drifted into the horse latitudes of the soul? Do you fall victim to corrosive fear that obscures who we are meant to be and blocks us from the rich resources, latent within us but not of our making, resources that inspire and guide us deeper into the heart of the world?

My most dramatic experience amidst the horse latitudes occurred when I was twenty-three. I didn’t know what direction my life would take, although at the time I felt like I should have. I was working with abused children in residential treatment. I didn’t see it as necessarily leading anywhere, but it was a job that gave me a sense of doing something worthwhile for others. It didn’t pay well, but I was living like a monk and socking funds away for I didn’t know what.

My fears escalated on the day a friend invited me to see the movie Slacker. The film is about people doing nothing with their lives, going from one character to another to another, with no clear connections. The camera follows one person and then after a chance meeting with another follows that other person. The cinematography is as aimless as the characters it portrays. I left the theatre utterly nauseous and terrified that my life resembled those on the screen. I believed I would be damned if I didn’t figure out what to do with my life, and by the next morning I’d decided to become a child psychiatrist. I immediately enrolled in UC Berkeley and Cal State Hayward to take physics, organic chemistry, and upper division biology. For fifteen months, while working full time, I got all the courses I needed, took the MCATS, applied to medical schools, and soon received interview requests.

Then grace happened, though it didn’t seem like grace at the time. One of the boys I worked with attacked me. I struggled to hold him down for over an hour before help arrived. A week later, I had a post-traumatic reaction. It came with a nightmare, during which I was engaged in a physical restraint of a child I hadn’t restrained before but it was taking all my energy, and then behind me approached the boy who attacked me. He was not in a threatening stance but instead simply raised his hand and touched my arm. The moment he touched me, terror surged through my body and I woke up an emotional wreck, unable to return to work for a couple of weeks. So instead of working, I went camping, during which I had an epiphany that my intention of going to medical school was motivated by fear and the dread of not living a noble life, that my calling was not for medicine but for ministry.

In that fateful dream, this boy who attacked me represented my shadow side. He was everything I sought not to be—impulsive, demonstrative of bravado, quick to anger, easily out of control. Yet, in the dream, he was not aggressive. He simply put his fingers to my arm, in a supportive gesture. He, or at least what he represented to me, was the tiger in my boat. I constantly had to be on my guard and yet he, in a symbolic sense, was the one who caused me to own up to my dread, to stop living out of fear, and connect with the authentic resources within. I had to go through the horse latitudes to face down the tiger in my boat.

I was lucky. If I hadn’t been attacked, I likely never would have taken leave from my work and all-consuming quest to get into medical school. I could have been consumed by my fear, as I believe sometimes we humans are, though we’d likely never admit it to others or even ourselves. When unchecked fear wells up from within, thoughts naturally latch onto it and we human beings are caught up in a shroud of anxiety, such that our reality is shaped by that anxiety and we, fettered by our fears, forget what is truly important and how we can forge forward. That’s why Yann Martel and his character Pi wake up to the fact, “you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear.”

Consuming fear often makes uncertainty unbearable such that we human beings are then especially prone to live with a forceful certitude, proclaiming that we have no doubts whatsoever. If you know such people, they are darn right scary—and they can be us. They express absolute certainty about moral and religious issues. Such people express no doubts whatsoever, upheld by a righteousness, claiming that the holy spirit is always in their sails. Such people are darn right scary. It is well nigh impossible to have a thoughtful dialog when they insist they are right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. For you are either with them or against them.

My colleague Judith Walker-Riggs shares what she says is an actual radio transcript [of a conversation between two officers in different locations] from the United States Chief of Naval Operations, October 10, 1995:
Station No. 1: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.
Station No. 2: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
Station No. 1: This is the captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Station No. 2: No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Station No. 1: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER ENTERPRISE. WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE U.S. NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!
Station No.2: This is the Puget Sound lighthouse. It's your call.

It would be funny it if weren’t so tragic that many of us move through the world with an arrogance and sense of entitlement that is characteristic of our culture. Too often we live with delusions of our grandeur and assuredness. It is unfortunate that uncertainty is typically deemed a weakness and doubt a failing. The assumption: there must be something wrong with you if you aren’t entirely sure of yourself. With such voices rampant, it is natural to feel isolated and cut off from what is real.

The first step of dealing with finding oneself among the horse latitudes is simply to acknowledge it. The path out begins when I say, my gosh, here I am enshrouded by fear and I’m not going to get out of this troubling lack of clarity by simply willing it so. Instead I must attend to my immediate predicament with more awareness and less dread and anguish. It is a gift to say to oneself, you may want to be living a different life, you may want to live in a different world than what is here and now, but this is your life and world. Embrace them. Don’t let your fears get the better of you. Engage in some practice to open the lines between your conscious self and the wisdom within your depths. Move through your fears so you can access again the resources available to you and be the person that you are called to be.

Our culture says that real men don’t cry. I say hogwash. To be real means pushing through one’s fears, not denying them. It means finding ways to change and grow as our life and world call us to do so. For me, tears come forth not from despair but from the tenderness and joy that results from waking up to the realization that all life is interconnected. Tears come forth realizing how foolish I can be, how easy it is to disconnect from the inspiring richness of life, and how close the resources of grace and beauty and truth are if only I look beyond my fear.

Sometimes life catapults us into a life we never intended to live, a life that has no certain path besides getting through the difficulties of the here and now. And much of the difficulty is the fear that promises to be our constant companion. We enter the horse latitudes of the soul when change occurs in our lives and we fail to adapt, when our fearful mind wants what is out of sync with one’s inward compass or one’s outer reality. Our work isn’t to banish the tiger from our lifeboat but instead to manage our fears such that we can be who we truly are. Fear isn’t something we can get rid of but it is something we can transcend. Perhaps our fears, that part of us we desperately don’t want to acknowledge or address, perhaps that scary, dangerous tiger in our lifeboat is the key to our survival, or at least the key to figuring out how to be a vibrant human being.

The words of Rumi hold great truth: The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.  You must ask for what you really want.  People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.

How unfortunately tempting and common it is to shut down, to close our eyes, drift through life, and squander the only thing we really have: our time and our precious lives. May the spirit of life lead us to the people and places that keep us truly awake. May we not be bound by habit or by practices that are not life-giving. Instead may we reach out for joy, that we might, in this early spring, taste the juice and sweetness of life each day.

May it be so. Blessed be. Amen.

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.