Heading Out - A Sermon for Opening Sunday September 2009
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 13 September 2009 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2009-09-13-9am-sermon.mp3}
“Beyond here there’s no map.
How you get there is where you’ll arrive;
How, dawn by dawn, you can see your way clear:
In ponds, sky, just as woods you walk through give to fields.
And rivers: beyond all burning,
You’ll cross on bridges you’ve long lugged with you.
What ever your route, go lightly, toward light.
Once you give away all save necessity, all’s mostly well:
What you used to believe you owned is nothing,
Nothing beside how you’ve come to feel.
You’ve no need now to give in or give out:
The way you’re going your body seems willing.
Slowly as it may otherwise tell you,
Whatever it comes to you’re bound to know.”
The words are from Philip Booth, a Maine poet, downeast on the Bagaduce Peninsula, near Castine. The title of the poem is the title of this sermon, “Heading Out.” But, as I read Booth’s poem, I found myself not in Maine but instead at the General Sutter Inn in Lititz, Pennsylvania, there in the café off the main lobby, eating breakfast with Buddha, and there is Otto Ringling, sarcastically asking his companion, Volya Rinpoche, a traveling companion forced on Otto by his sister, he is asking this maroon-robed, head-shaved, stocky and always smiling man of indeterminate age, “What is the meaning of life?”
Let me pause here to say how grateful and how humbled and how surprised I am that so many of you accepted my invitation to read Ronald Merullo’s novel this summer, this book entitled BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA. It was a novel I loved, but I know some of you were not so enamored, particularly with the ending. I have found in a lifetime of reading that many novels are best without the last chapter, but more on that later.
I’m getting ahead of myself, and I know that many if not most of you have not read this novel and will have no idea what I mean. Let’s just say that Otto and his sister whom he calls Seese have lost their parents, father and mother killed in a highway accident near their farm in Dickinson, North Dakota, west of Bismarck. Otto and his family live in a suburb of New York City; Seese lives in New Jersey, and, as you heard Margie read from the beginning of the novel, one or both of them must head west to settle the parent’s estate. They must go home.
Otto cannot persuade either his wife or his two teenage children to make this a family trip, so he’s left with his sister, a relationship that is apparently not terribly close. Seese has lived life on the edge, on the fringe, attracting men to her that have big needs, and then she moves on from them. Otto and Seese live in different worlds.
Otto sets out, drives into New Jersey to pick up his sister, and Seese is waiting there with this monk, Volya Rinpoche, and Seese says that not only will Rinpoche be taking her place in the car, but that she intends to give Rinpoche her share of the inherited property so that he can have a center for teaching. Let us say here that Otto is most displeased with all of this, incredulous, apoplectic even, but the whole thing is on a fast track, and Otto and Rinpoche set off, Otto’s knuckles white with anger, clenching the steering wheel; Rinpoche, a monk from the hinterlands of Russia, about to see America for the first time.
The novel takes place at many levels. It is a road trip, filled with adventure, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, into North Dakota. They have many adventures, and we laugh with them as Rinpoche plays mini-golf and goes bowling, or as Rinpoche calls it, “bohling,” all for the first time. It is a road trip and it is a food trip, too, as Otto and Rinpoche struggle with where and what to eat, the food’s fat content, its quantity, its frequency.
A road trip, a trip of adventure, a trip of good food, and it is a trip of human encounter, too: the Chippewa Bowling Lanes in South Bend, Indiana, where Otto and Rinpoche are assigned a lane next to what Otto calls the Association of Tattooed and Felonious Motorcyclists of the Midwest, or the mini-golf place near Duluth, where they meet the pompous Eveline and Matthew Fritton, both teachers in the local university, who seem determined to put Rinpoche and his life-style down, and the list of people they encounter goes on, the servers in restaurants, the desk clerks in motels.
And then there is the most important encounter between Otto and Rinpoche, right there in the car, there in the restaurants, all of it, Otto, fighting so hard to resent this man, this monk, this puzzle, there in the breakfast room of the General Sutter Inn, early in the trip, face to face with this monk, no “so how about the weather?” or “what about the Red Sox?”; Otto wants to mock Rinpoche and so he asks what you’d ask any monk, “so, what’s the meaning of life?” And, almost immediately, Rinpoche reaches into the folds of his robe, brings out a clump of dirt and drops it into Otto’s full glass of cold water. And Rinpoche just smiles.
Otto is enraged. “Wwwhhhhaaaattttt?” “The water should be clear, life should be clear, but we are forever stirring things up,” Rinpoche says, and he reaches over and, with a spoon, stirs up the dirt and the water again. We’re at a new level in the novel now; it turns out this BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA is really a story of the trip Otto is taking, not just the trip with the scenery outside, but the interior spiritual journey Otto is taking as well. Otto is heading out. Otto is heading home, yes, to his home on what he called the Snake River in Dickinson, North Dakota, but home also in the way Philip Booth means.
“Beyond here there’s no map.
How you get there is where you’ll arrive;
How, dawn by dawn, you can see your way clear:
In ponds, sky, just as woods you walk through give to fields.
And rivers: beyond all burning,
You’ll cross on bridges you’ve long lugged with you.”
So, the novel is many things. We begin to find that Otto’s trip is our trip, too. It is, in many ways, the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and all the challenges he must meet on his trip home to Ithaka. Do you remember the island of Kalypso and the sea god Poseidon and the Cyclops? They’re all here in the novel: the motorcyclists, the college professors.
In his book THE LONGING FOR HOME, Frederick Buechner draws “the connection between the home we knew and the home we dream,” and he says that all our lives we are about the business of returning to this home we remember, well maybe not this home or that home exactly, but perhaps something of the innocence of beginnings. His editor says that for Buechner the word “home” “not only recalls the place we grew up in and that had much to do with the people we eventually became, but also points…[to] the lifelong search we are all engaged in to make a new home for ourselves… which is at the same time a search to find something like the wholeness and comfort of home within ourselves.” And can you see Rinpoche reaching into the dark folds of his robe to deposit dirt into the water glass? What is the meaning of life? Could the clearness of the water be “to find something like the wholeness and comfort of home within ourselves?”
What if the span of our precious lifetime IS a journey circling around back to home, to the place of home within us that approaches a wholeness for which we long? “I believe,” Buechner says, “that what we long for most in the home we knew is the peace and charity that, if we were lucky, we first came to experience there, and I believe that it is that same peace and charity we dream of finding once again in the home that the tide of time draws us toward.”
This journey we are on is a rich one, with high stakes, filled with breath-taking joys and heart wrenching sorrows. We need one another. Please remember what we do here together. Remember the challenge Kim and Maile put before us at the time of the chalice lighting, all centered on the theme of home and the importance of making a home.
Philip Booth in his poem, Roland Merullo in BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA, Homer in the story of Odysseus, Frederick Buechner in THE LONGING FOR HOME, and there is Linda Weltner, writing some years ago in the BOSTON GLOBE, they’re all telling us the same thing: “Night after night,” Weltner writes, “through the long summers and into the autumn, the neighborhood children play hide and seek, streaming out into the gray twilight as soon as the dishes are cleared from the dinner table. Gathering in the street, they quickly divide into hiders and searchers, they fan out behind the garages and backyards that encircle the steps that represent home base. In the dark my husband and I would often see the small figures sneaking past our wall, their bodies tense and ready for the long sprint to the steps. In years past, one or the other of our daughters would return from the game so far past her bedtime it was never mentioned. ’How’d you do?’ we’d call out to a child radiant with the glory of late hours and a star-studded sky. ‘I got home safe,’ she’d whisper proudly before slipping up to bed.”
Linda remembers this and says that she knows her daughter had to slip “through the darkness and the creeping shadow of trees moving along the road, past the older boys waiting to intercept the younger runners. With the anxiety of flight behind her,” Linda says, “she made it to safety and security.”
Carl Scovel, in his book, NEVER FAR FROM HOME, has a story from his radio sermons entitled, “Allee Allee Home Free!” in which Carl, too, remembers the childhood game of hide and seek. Carl wonders if the game itself is not, in some sense, part of our spiritual journey, too, this need to hide and then to be found. “In hiding,” he writes, “we began to find out who we were. We had to do that. Everyone does. But then there came a point when we wanted to be found, but all we knew was how to hide. And so we had to come out of our hiding places.”
BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA is, in a very real sense, the story of Otto Ringling coming out of his hiding place, and that is why, without giving it away, I liked the ending of this novel so much. But what I celebrate today, in all this talk of home, and challenges and journeys, and glasses of water filled with so much sediment, lives filled with such sediment, is that we are not alone. We journey together. We set out today, at the beginning of our 374th year, men, women and children, in one moment a teacher, in one moment a learner, talking the talk, walking the walk. What a trip, each of us, heading out, heading home.
“You’ve no need now to give in or give out:
The way you’re going your body seems willing.
Slowly as it may otherwise tell you,
Whatever it comes to you’re bound to know.”