Maybe you have picked up on the fact that many of the sermons I am doing this year are framed with questions. I recently preached on a sermon called “Who Are You,” next week “What is Truth,” and today “Are You Lost?” I didn’t realize until I started writing these how truly existential they really were, and I also didn’t realize that I was really onto something. I was in a bookstore the other day. I saw a new book called The Answer, another book entitled Question, and yesterday Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing? 25 Great Questions. Questions are central to our being. They are central to our quest to become who we are meant to be. Questions really are important. Howie Fuguet, who couldn’t be here today—Peter Banos is going to be clerk in his stead—is one of the great lawyers in the city of Boston. And the other day I asked him, just idly, “How much do you charge?” And Howie said, “I get $50.00 for three questions.” I said, “Howie, that’s awfully steep, isn’t it?” And he said, “Yes, Stephen, it is. What’s your last question?” (Laughter)
You are very quick. I thought there would be a long pause there. (Laughter) And today’s question is “Are You Lost?” It’s a really poignant question. That was rather a wrenching reading that I gave you today, from Here If You Need Me by the UU minister Kate Braestrup. It’s a really unexpected best-seller. I really can’t recommend the book more highly. It is wrenching and humorous. It is just a real tour de force of writing, and I will share a little bit of Kate’s story as one of my colleagues. But before I do that, there are so many different varieties of feeling and experiencing lostness: as many as there are people, and certainly there as many ways in which we can then experience that moment of feeling found, which is a note that we will touch in our concluding hymn of “Amazing Grace.” I am not particularly interested this morning in what other faiths may say about Unitarian Universalist spirituality and lostness. There was a sort of a snide comment in a recent Harvard Divinity School book review that said that basically “When will liberal religion just own up to the fact that it is Humanism tinged with mystery.” And I thought to myself, “I don’t think I have to own up to that. I am actually proud of that.” Humanism tinged with mystery. We live saturated in mystery. Every step of our life, from the first breath we draw and to the last, we abide in mystery. Absolutely. And that’s why the questions matter—the asking of them, and the sharing of them, and the moments in which we are truly seized by something larger than ourselves.
So I am not interested in what other faiths may say about us one way or the other. I think we do ourselves a grave disservice whenever we let someone else’s spirituality judge our own. I am not interested in that. In more than twenty-five years of ministry, I have sat with many people who have asked and pondered, and sometimes with tears, have talked about their own sense of wandering, their own sense of exile; particularly from their childhood religion. And circumstances of life have just thrown them, and they feel lost, and they wonder, “What will be the foundation that allows me to go forward? The way leads on. What will be the spirituality that allows me to get up off my knees, and sometimes allows me to sometimes get back to my knees? What will be the way? How can I get past the experience?” The ancient Catholic theologian, St. John of the Cross, called it “the dark night of the soul.” We have all experienced it; even the great saints have, as we will see along the way.
When I encountered Kate Braestrup’s book Here If You Need Me, I remembered that in her work as a Maine Game Warden chaplain, most of what she does is to help and stand by, and witness the looking for people: people who are missing, people that are injured. And so her work is bound up in sitting with families, often in the most acute unknowingness that you can ever experience; and she lived it herself. I thought about something that Rosemary and I talk about a lot, which is, “Is all your ministry the people who are asking for ministry, and right in front of you? What about those people that are beyond your vision, beyond your ken? What do you do to those that are lost? You minister to them, too. I thought about an old joke about a traveler in Maine who’s really thoroughly befuddled and lost in the woods. He finds, to his relief, a man sitting on the front porch of his house. He goes down the driveway, and he says, “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me how to get to Brunswick from here?” “Don’t know.” “How I can get back on to Route 1?” “Don’t know.” “Is there a gas station nearby where I could maybe get a map?” “Couldn’t say.” “Well, you don’t really know much about being around here, do you?” And the old man leaned back on the porch and looked at his visitor and said, “Well, it seems to me that you’re the one who’s lost.” (Laughter)
Well, if you are ever lost in the Maine woods, Kate Braestrup is there. She understands deeply the intricate meanings of the phrase of her title, Here If You Need Me. That wonderful, bountiful reading shows us what a chaplain really has to do. Her stories are beautiful and stark. But the frame of the book is in fact her own sense of being lost, and how she found her way back. Her husband, Drew Griffith, was a trooper for the Maine state police, and he was planning to go to seminary and become a Unitarian Universalist minister. He imagined himself serving a church and working as a law enforcement chaplain on the side. All the dimensions of this work he was looking forward to doing with great delight. She calls him earnest, intelligent, brave and tender. Drew would have made a great minister. But one Monday morning in April 1996, after her alarm clock went off, Drew got up, and two hours later he was dead, struck on a nearby bridge near their home by a truck, leaving her a widow with four children. In her grief Kate Braestrup decided, “How do I go forth? How in the midst of my grief am I going to make sense of what has been taken away from me? “ And she thought long and hard, and she thought about Drew, and she decided to follow his dream herself. She applied to Bangor Seminary, and she went into the chaplaincy, and months into the grief she heard him one morning as she awoke in that sort of area between dream and awakeness. She heard Drew’s voice speak to her loud and clear. “How can I help? Do you need my help?” “Yes, I need help,” she whispered. “I can’t do this. And I want you here. I want your body pressed to mine in bed. Drew, I am afraid I won’t be able to make a life without you.” “I will be right here,” his voice assured her.
And so she finds that middle way, as we all have to do, between skepticism and sustenance. She finds her Unitarian Universalist way, to find out what in her grief she may stand upon, and how her way goes forward. Her brother wrote her in an email, “Dear Kate, You don’t really believe in God, do you?” She had to answer that question the way we all do—which is, even in her times of feeling lost, with the most piercing kind of loss of all, what kind of God did she choose to witness to? And so she found herself a chaplain to Drew’s brothers and sisters in arms. She admitted that her task was a great hook; she says there’s nothing like the plucky widow. (Laughter) And she found her way marked, yes, by loss and trauma, but also by the love of her kids, and the people and comradeship of the men and women that she works alongside, who go out and find the missing, who go out and find the lost; and she is a witness. In the seven years she has learned that she wants and needs to be that minister—what she calls “the God gig.” She has discovered something in doing the work and counseling people along the way—people even maimed and wounded who they might be, who are stunned by what they have to do. She has learned, “When you are lost, belong to something. Do something.” She talks about how many people, especially Unitarian-Universalists, will say, “You know, I am spiritual, but I am not religious.” She thought a lot about the way Drew lived his life, about the things he believed in and cultivated, the deliberate, regular practices he followed, within a chosen faith community, to nurture his own spiritual development and to translate it into what she calls “useful, loving action.” She said Drew was religious; and she told her spiritual director, “You know, I am religious, but I am not really spiritual. Mine in reality was a pretty plain and practical calling. I needed to do something.” And more when you are most lost, be there if someone needs you. “Be here if you need me.” When you feel most spiritually adrift, unmoored, spun around and doctrinally dizzy, alone and perplexed and feeling lost, do not wait to be rescued. Find your place to stand. Find your foundation of something not only to believe in, but to belong to, and be there for someone else. It is the only way, even when it seems almost impossible to believe anything at all. When you can’t even be spiritual, then be religious. Be located in this real world and offer something, even if it is only silence and solace. Be there to witness. Be there to listen. Be there to love as best you can.
When reading my colleague’s heartrending story, I was reminded of another figure, another religious woman recently in the news. Her name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. When she was 18, she left her home in Macedonia, and journeyed to Ireland in 1928 to become a nun, because she wanted to work in missions in Bengal. You know her today as Mother Teresa, and at that point in her life she was filled with faith. She was going into the life of a nun, where quite literally she was going to be married to Jesus, that sense of being held in special favor. Then, as her work in India began, a strange and painful 50-year spiritual exile began for her. Kind of like Kate, unexpectedly, she was unmoored. She felt absolutely lost. The figure that had offered the most love was suddenly gone, and she had to find another inner orientation to do what she called “The Work.” She said it was a terrible darkness. She wrote to her spiritual director,
Now, Father, since 1949, this terrible sense of loss, this untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God, which gives me such pain deep in my heart. Darkness is such that I really do not see; neither with my mind, nor with my reason. The place of God in my soul is blank. There is no God in me. And when the pain of longing is so great, I just feel he does not want me or need me. God is not there. And sometimes I just hear my own heart cry. My God. And nothing else comes. The torture and the pain, I cannot explain.
And she suffered; she suffered greatly. Her male spiritual directors and superiors never completely understood the extremity, the pain that she experienced of the sense of being lost to God. She called it “my crucible,” because really, her faith had been ground into ashes. “Such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.” When these letters that she wrote to her spiritual advisers were published last year and then publicized and broadcast on CNN, many were shocked, but then something really unexpected happened. Many of the faithful in fact were drawn in, relieved and liberated. Mother Teresa had experienced this. She wrote,
Heaven, what emptiness. Not a single thought of heaven enters my mind. I am afraid to write all these terrible things that pass in my soul because in my heart there is no faith, no love, no trust. There is so much pain. The pain of longing and the pain of not being wanted. But my prayer of union is not there any longer. I no longer pray.
Shocking, yes; but because she continued to do the work, because her life shone with such light and compassion, her inner desert still offered a deep reservoir of compassion to the poor and dying of Calcutta. They felt it. They never knew how much she suffered. And I think about those more than 25 years of conversations. People come to me. Now some people are absolutely calm, and even secure, in their spiritual stoicism and simplicity. They are even sometimes happy to dwell in a religious sensibility that is stark and free of gods and saviors and scriptures. But far more often, people come to me hurting. Sometimes they stay, and sometimes they are gone, but they come to me perplexed by what they have lost, feeling desperate, alone in their search, and hurting. In Mother Teresa’s words, “It is so painful to be lonely for God,” and yet even she found her way. The pain never went away, but it is impossible to say that in the end she did not find her way forward. She had her work; she loved her sisters and close community in joy; and she said to all, “Be kind to one another.” She said something that has really affected me, and I would like to share it with you. If you take home anything today, please take this. She said, “I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.” She confessed near the end of her life to her friend,
I will come and speak of this beautiful work. No, Father, I am not alone. I have His darkness. I have His pain. I have this terrible longing … in unbroken union.
Even in our feeling lost there is longing, and there is direction that allows us to say, “I am here if you need me.” And so I add to these incredible women’s stories my own in simple guise. I do not know if there is a God; but long ago I chose, even in spiritual loneliness, to live as if there is, and that this love is in the end the only thing that really matters; and that my pain and my brokenness and incompleteness (and I’m well aware of what those things are) are in fact my particular path to feel this love; and that it is in doing the work that we all find our way, no matter how spiritually empty we may be. Mother Teresa concluded at last that it is when you are most empty that the spirit can do something with you. She said, “I am only at the disposal, and even God can do nothing with somebody already full. That is the beautiful part.”
Are you lost? Well, the way is within you. The way is before you. The way is holding you. Amen.
