Going back a little bit earlier in the service (if I have my Hebrew mythology correct) I do not believe that Adam was the ultimate creation of God. I believe that Eve was, because He had to work out the kinks, first of all, and get something absolutely perfect! (Do I get any Brownie points for that? We’ll see.)
In 1921 Vesuvius was erupting again. People all over Europe came to climb up the slopes to get as near to the flowing lava as they could. One man climbed to the very tip. His walking stick actually began to catch on fire, he got so near to the fire itself. His name was Lieutenant James Holman. He was 26 years old, fresh from the British Royal Navy, and he was blind. He had climbed and he stood at the very lip of Vesuvius past midnight. His companions who had gone up the slope had had to leave but because he was blind it didn’t matter that it was dark and he went up even further into what was described as “the lurid glare of the red hot masses, the frightful bellowing of the burning mountain upon which we stood.” Just two years earlier, Holman had been a bedridden invalid slowly retreating from life, his Naval career cut off because of an inexplicable blindness. But he found a way forward for himself. It was travel.
In a recent book called The Sense of the World by Jason Roberts, the author describes how this young blind Lieutenant became the most prolific traveler in world history. He went everywhere and he wrote about it, and though he dropped out of history and has only recently been rediscovered in this fascinating new book, the blind traveler, as he was known, really help revivify what it meant for people to confront the world in a whole new way. As a Knight of Windsor, Fellow of the Royal Society, best-selling author, he taught people what it really meant to get up out of a sick bed and to move past blindness and to confront the world. It is said he traversed the great globe itself more thoroughly than any traveler who ever existed.
Holman was an amazing man. In rising up from his sick bed, after his trip to Vesuvius he came up with a secret plan. He didn’t tell anyone because, frankly, they wouldn’t have let him go. They wouldn’t have set him free from the Knights of Windsor Hospital where he was living. He had a secret desire to do what no one had done: to traverse by land the entire globe as best he could. He called it ‘a current of the world.’ He had almost no money but he decided that that was not going to impede him. Not the blindness and not his finances either. He was going to encounter the world as he found it by faith and by circumstance, and to go alone, to go boldly. And, he did it! In 1828 and 1829, he basically did the entire circuit.
St. Augustine said a long time ago that the world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page. Holman opened up the volume and moved out and moved forward. In reading this book, I thought, oh, my goodness, a great metaphor for Unitarian Universalism, because there’s another kind of travel! It is a quest to go inward and there’s also the same quest from a different perspective which is to traverse the moral universe, to go outward, to form connection, to go forward, to travel blind into realms we do not know.
And why? To discover. To know something new. To stand where no one has ever stood before.
As a kid I fell in love with explorers. On my mother’s side of the family, she was known as Katherine Byrd, and therefore Richard Byrd, the Arctic explorer was my great hero. I used to take cold showers so I could be ready to confront the Arctic. I learned to speak penguin. I was totally into Richard Byrd and Little America. From that I began to read a lot about explorers. This is odd, and Liz will tell you that like Woody Allen I’m ‘at two’ with nature, and yet I loved reading about explorers and confronting the world. What I liked about them is that they had a goal and they had a dream and they formed a team. They formed an expedition. It faced its obstacles and it faced its crises and they returned home when everything went well. Sometimes it didn’t.
There’s a great new book published by The Smithsonian called An Adventurer’s Handbook. It describes on page 70-71 how to deal with rattlesnake bite, how to avoid being attacked by a shark, how to survive a charging elephant, and (I thought for all you UU ministers) how to deal with a charging lion. It says “Be careful of tall grass. Lions love to hide in it.” This is useful for lots of folks. “If you’re confronted with a lion, do not run away because it will charge. You need to back away slowly and when a lion flattens its ears and swings its tail stiffly up and down, it’s a sign it’s angry and about to attack. But if its tail is twitching somewhat more relaxed and randomly, you should be OK.” So it’s a lot of practical advice for people like you and me who have our own exploration to do.
When Ernest Shackleton in 1914 was putting together his second great expedition into the Arctic he put this advertisement in the London Times. “Wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant journey and safe return doubtful.” He got 5,000 applications! And I’ve often thought that as a Unitarian minister maybe something along these lines could be our ad – “Wanted, for an expedition that will last a lifetime, asking much of our wallet and our ideals and our sense of self, a complete commitment of our lives, and no prospect of return or reward or even the favor of others.”
There’s no one model for the ideal explorer except that’s what you and I are, in the spiritual realm. I did find however, certain similar attributes in thinking about all of this: belief in the end that you can travel, that you can make it. It doesn’t matter like Holman that you are blind. And a certain doggedness and curiosity fused together so that you move forward, you keep going even to the very lips of the abyss. Optimism and heartiness and hope and, yes, an ability to read a compass correctly, that’s always nice as well. And to find in the end if you’re going on a spiritual expedition, an adventure of the soul, take very seriously David Livingston’s advice – to take as little impedimenta as you can. I’ve often thought when I’m doing orientation for new members; one of the things that we always talk about is our religious past. What are the things you need to set down so that you can move forward? What are the things that you need to leave behind? In the end, what is forgiveness all about, but to set down the heavy weight so that you may move into a new life. Old visions, old dreams. Old scriptures, you may need to set them down. But not to be in stasis, and not to stand still, but to move and to go forward and to explore. Yes, it’s best to travel light but that’s so that you can go far.
I mentioned Shackleton. What was the name of his ship? The Endurance. This is a lifetime. This goes on. And therefore there are certain things to be learned. I learned it well from Ernest Shackleton because he went on an expedition where everything went wrong. Everything. They were trapped in ice for 281 days. They stayed aboard the ship and finally the ice moved in and literally crushed the ship and it sank. So they went from ice flow to ice flow, Shackleton keeping the men together, keeping their morale up, keeping them alive. And, finally they realized this wasn’t going to work either. They had only three small boats and so they finally decided that they had to go for broke. They aimed out in a smaller group for the South Georgia Islands. They landed on the wrong side and therefore had to traverse the entire mountainous region in the worst time of year and finally four months later Shackleton then was able to circle back and save every single member of the expedition. One of the great tour de forces of exploration. But it’s much, much more than this. It is a metaphor for the lives that you and I will lead. There will be ice flows that you and I are on. There will be mountains that we have to climb when we think that we have no more endurance. And Shackleton said,
“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved and triumphed. We had groveled down and yet grasped at glory, grown bigger than the bigness of the hole and we had seen God in all God’s splendor, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of humanity.”
And he had. And how did it happen? The Shackletons and all those who go on spiritual exploration, yes, you are all ultimately responsible; yes, we go alone, even unto death. But along the way we build teams. We have families, we have congregations, and we have those spiritual geniuses who have walked before and they go with us too. How do you build a team? With communication, listening, being flexible, positive, unflappable, selfless, confident. These are all qualities that Shackleton had and exhibited every day. He kept the morale of his men high because he ultimately gave them the sense that through confidence, they would all live and make it together. He used it through humor as well. He said, “A good laugh does not require any additional weight and it counts for so much.” How did he build his team? The same way all of us build teams who go together into dangerous territories, into those areas where, yes, we travel blind. Patience, and consideration, good humor, discipline, self sacrifice and most of all, and most of all, empathy.
All of these qualities as I read them and thought about them, ultimately came back to me as being about compassion. Good leaders, people that build teams that move forward, in the end, you get the sense from them that you’re held; that you’re in good company. You may share their greater confidence. There’s a wonderful story about a disciple who asked the holy teacher, “How do I know when the dawn is broken? When the darkness has fled? I imagine it must be a moment when I can begin to tell a sheep from a dog, out of the darkness.” And the holy teacher said, “No.” The disciple thought more and said, “Is it the moment that I can discern a peach from a pomegranate?” And the teacher said, “No, absolutely not.” The student said, “Is it the moment that I can discern the difference between a white thread and a black thread when dawn breaks?” The teacher said, “No. The only time you can discern the breaking of dawn is when you can look in the face of your brother and your sister and know them as you. Until then, there’s no dawn and there is only darkness.”
This kind of deep-seated empathy may be ours. This compassionate struggle. Yes, the great expedition met unbelievable physical hardship but everyone that came back said it was the human struggle within to maintain morale, to keep a sense of direction and early vision; these are the things that brought them home and moved them forward to yet another challenge. And the guides that we ask for, there are great religious geniuses who have gone before and the problem with spiritual adventuring in this kind of exploration is that we assume that sometimes we have to try their same path. But that’s not what they’re ever asking us to do. We may be guided by the wisdom of the past but we have our own path to walk, our own specific challenges to meet. They ask us to go our route.
Emerson said it really well a long time ago. “Nothing is secure but life and transition and the energizing sprit.” Let me say that again. Nothing is secure but life, transition and the energizing spirit. It is by these things that we explore and we explore within. The realm of this emerging truth is splendid and to be fully tested. There is a spiritual path for you. I can’t tell you what it is, but it is unique to you. And, there is a spiritual confrontation that awaits all of us and we never know when it will be but as we freely move forward and freely embrace and choose to travel, and even travel blind, we realize that this is not a burden, but an invitation to what is most exhilarating about life. The wonderful adventure of life. It is, in short, a spiritual adventure and there’s never been an easy way to do it, nor should you ask for one.
George Mallory, the great Everest explorer, was once asked, “Why did you climb Everest?” He replied in his famous Life magazine interview, “Because it is there.” I thought a lot about that in the last week. Why do we go on spiritual exploring; why do we go deep; and why do we go out? In the end I believe that unless we do so, we will discover that we are not there. We find ourselves in such exploration. That is how we confront who we are and who we are meant to be because unless we travel this route inward and adventure boldly, dare to truly become ourselves, there will be nothing there in the end. Like Holman I believe that we make ourselves healthy, we rise when we make ourselves vital, by taking the chance, by traveling blind. There is no road map to the soul but there is much wisdom to be gained by those who have gone before so that we may find our path.
Phillip Brooks, just around the corner, said “Do not pray for easy lives. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers that are equal to your tasks.” We have mountains to climb; we have places to go that scare us; we have a spiritual adventure in front of us that presents us with an existential question of Who are you? Where do you wish to go? What do you want to do with this precious life you have been given? No one can answer this question for you but you may form a team around you. We may go together. There is something great inside you. There is something powerful that you have not yet tapped. I believe that’s why you’re in this sanctuary this morning.
Abraham Lincoln used to go to worship services on Wednesday nights to hear a Presbyterian minister named Gurley. He was leaving the service one night when his assistant John Hay asked him, “Mr. Lincoln, what did you think of the service?” Lincoln thought for a moment and said, “Well, the content was excellent. Dr. Gurley spoke with great eloquence. It was obvious he had worked very hard on that sermon.” “So you thought it was a great sermon, Mr. President,” said Hay. “No I did not say that,” said Lincoln. “I said that the content was excellent and that the preacher spoke with eloquence but Dr. Gurley tonight forgot one important matter. He forgot to ask us to do something great.”
I have been a Unitarian Universalist minister for twenty-nine years. I pray that I have a long and fruitful way still to go. My theology has dramatically changed in those thirty-some years. I’m not the same person I was when I set out. I believe that I have been blessed, but I also know that I am not done by any means. I am incomplete and though I hope I travel on matured and even mellowed by the things I have experienced and even by the wounds that I have sustained, the reality is I know I’ve just begun and I have a deep exhilaration and impatience to be on my way to the next journey, the next adventure.
That’s why I came to Boston and to an urban church, to confront elements of ministry that I had never experienced before. That’s why I’m so excited about having Paul Ciennwa on board because we’re confronting depths in music that I don’t believe I’ve ever heard before. We’re starting to envision ministries that can change us and change this church. We have spiritual adventures before us as a community and to each of you, you have only begun. You have only begun to go deep and to move out. I ask of you something great, which is to become the person that you were meant to be; to discover those gifts which you have only yet briefly touched; to discover a compassion, an ability to forgive, and in the end the ability to form teams, to move out and to move up and to travel together, as traveling souls, as in a universe of many roads. Let us travel together.
Amen.
