Tracing a Spiritual Odyssey
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 19 September 2010 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
This is a sermon that began in a booth at Helen’s Restaurant next door. You may know those booths, kind of comfy and cramped, it’s hard not to let your knees bump up against the person across from you. Sometimes, I’ll have a breakfast meeting there with one of you, to catch up, go a little deeper than we can coffee hour, ask for your ideas.
(When my kids were little, they thought Helen’s meant French fries and ice cream cones, so when I’d get up in the morning and say I was going to a “meeting” at Helen’s, their eyes would get wide. “You mean you get to eat at Helen’s as a part of your job?”)
You asked me something, I don’t remember your question exactly— it was about my spiritual odyssey, how things had changed for me in these last years. I started to speak, stopped, found myself almost stuttering. And then I just got really quiet.
You were gracious about it but I found myself thinking later, “For Pete’s sake, I’m a minister, I should be able to answer that!”
Your question lingered with me through the summer and now, as we come to the end of the High Holy days— reflection, repentance, renewal— it is the “reflection” part that is on my mind today.
Reflecting on my own spiritual odyssey, wondering what your’s has been and how I might hear it. How in a culture that has us skating on the surfaces of things, we could go deeper here in this community and invite one another into this kind of storytelling. If you were here this summer and heard some wonderful sermons from Donna, Will, Jim, John and others you may have heard bits and pieces of their odyssey.
Spiritual Odyssey. To me, that means the story of a soul as it moves through time.
Now, when I say soul, I don’t go to the dictionary to look it up
I bet there is some complicated and precise theological definition, but
What I mean by soul is the thing in you that makes you you
That makes Sara Ballard Sara or makes Rick Moore Rick, what makes Gary Gary
There will never be another you. In the whole history of the world.
What is it in your very depths that makes you “you”
I call that the soul. Maybe you use other words,
Your spiritual odyssey is the story of you, from the time you were born till now.
* * * *
Often, we hear “spiritual odyssey” and go straight to the “what do I believe” question.
But William James had a different take on it
William James, who died 100 years ago this year, was a doctor, a scientist, teacher at Harvard, the founder of the modern discipline of psychology
He was someone who rarely stepped foot inside a church his whole life but thought about religion and wrote about religion in a deep and compelling way, so much so that his book The Varieties of Religious Experience has become a classic.
“Religion” he said in one of his lectures, is “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
There is nothing about belief here. Nothing about ideas.
Sure, we CAN start by asking “what do you believe” but I wonder what would happen if we said to one another, “Tell me a story” and listened to whatever came next, listened for the “feelings, acts and experiences.”
** * *
Of course, the word “spiritual” can be tricky.
As Gary said last week about the word “God,” it’s one of these words that has so many meanings that we back off from using it altogether.
We hear “spiritual,” and our heads get busy. Analysing, defining.
Our heads get busy.
But our hearts know.
Don’t they?
Put the word aside for a minute and think about your experience. Think about a time someone has stopped you in the hall or pulled you aside at coffee hour and said “how’s it going?”
A time when someone has stood there,
looked into your eyes,
listened to the words coming out of your mouth.
“How’s it going?” we ask one another. And then we listen.
We do it all the time here.
In small group ministry or covenant groups, women’s circle, potluck suppers, on the bus driving across Transylvania
At youth group, choir, play rehearsal. Standing outside in the parking lot in the dark after a meeting.
“How’s it going? “
“My husband lost his job last week I’m scared.”
“The doctor called, I have to go back in.”
“My daughter is having trouble in school again.”
“My father is beginning to fail.”
Or
“She had the baby!—it’s a boy!”
“I’m in remission, did you know?”
“He found a job.”
“I met someone!”
“She made the soccer team!”
The big things, the small things.
In bits and pieces,
here and there,
now and then,
we tell each other,
we tell each other how it is with our heart today
how it goes with our spirit.
We ask, we listen, and
As theologian Nelle Morton says, “we hear one another into speech.”
And you know if somehow we could pick up all those bits and pieces,
all those answers, all those moments,
and string them together like jewels on a strand of gold,
I think we might begin to catch a glimpse of what a spiritual odyssey might look like.
* * * *
Anne Lamott tells young writers not to write just about the shiny surfaces of things but to try to crash through the ice. “I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see. I want writers to plunge through the holes, the holes we try to fill up with all the props. In those holes and in the spaces around them exist all sorts of possibility including the chance to see who we are and to glimpse the mystery.”
When we write our spiritual odysseys, we have to write about the holes. And we have to write about the high points too. The mountain peaks. The places where are souls were strengthened or challenged, where they found solace, the times when we felt like we’d finally come back home and knew the place as if for the first time ever.
* * * * * *
When I was 24, I took a class called “Spiritual Autobiography” taught by Carl Scovel, the minister of King’s Chapel where I’d grown up. I had drifted away from church as a teenager, leaving the God of my childhood for an atheism which made more sense to me. But in my early twenties, a period of dislocation saw me heading back home to live with my parents and try to find my footing again. One of the things I did was go back to church. It was kind of an odd thing for a young person to do. I told myself it wouldn’t last (and look at me now!)
We met on the second floor of the parish house on Beacon Street, one of those tall brick buildings with the old glass window panes that shine violet in the sun.
I walked up green velvet stairs to a big room with high ceilings and deep red wallpaper that made the room cosy on those cold winter nights.
We sat around a large mahogany table, and
Over the next 6 weeks, Carl led us through a series of drawing and writing exercises, and then we wrote and read aloud our “spiritual autobiography.”
I was young, rebellious, angry about the suffering of the world and probably angry my own suffering as well.
I was questioning any God who could let children go hungry or die too young. When it came to my turn to read, I’m embarrassed to tell you how long my story went on. Page after page. I was ranting and raving. I was working things out on the page. I was meandering and theological by turns. Mostly meandering. There were patient people in that room, let me tell you.
* * *
“I began to know my story then,” writes Wendell Berry, and that was true for me. It was a rough and ragged beginning, that “Spiritual Autobiography” class, but it was a beginning. It helped me articulate and name questions and wonderings that had been with me a long time but I’d never been asked to ponder before. I was on a spiritual odyssey that would take me on to community organizing, Harvard Divinity School, ordained ministry. That would take me on to marriage, raising children, taking care of my parents as they grew older.
It would take me from not believing in God to returning to the God of my Judaeo-Christian child to moving on to a new place where it seemed I had left the notion of a personal God, moving towards more of a Hindu or Buddhist notion of a transcendent energy, a consciousness in the universe. The ultimate not as a person or a god but as a mystery, a mystery we can never truly name or understand but only try to catch sight of in glimpses and glances. A mystery which, if we are very lucky, we might even enter into, now and again.
Life was a spiritual odyssey, Carl had helped me to see. And there were were touch stones along the way
Like the year I lived in Paris, so exciting and sometimes so terribly lonely. My head would say I had left religion behind, but my feet took me inside the cathedrals in Paris just to sit for a while, my soul soothed in the sanctuary of those vast shadowy spaces, incense lingering, candles flickering, organ playing.
Sitting in a circle with teenagers on a sunny Vermont hillside in silent Quaker meeting
Protest marches. Community organizing in Roxbury. Coming to know a Boston very different from the one I’d seen as a child growing up on Beacon Hill.
Harvard Divinity School where women professors asked me not to tell them what other writers said but to tell them what I thought. I was beginning to find my own voice. New theologies coming out of campesino base communities in Latin America. Feminine images of the divine. A God who was not static or male but fluid and changing. A God that was, as Forrest Church once said, more a verb than a noun.
Rich and I in El Salvador in the 80s when death squads were real and I’d flinch every time I saw a Jeep Cherokee with black tinted windows, their car of choice. Kneeling down to look at the blood stain on the white marble floor in the chapel, where Romero had been shot, where his body had fallen.
Walking with my sister across a plain in northern India, under a sky so blue and impossibly wide it felt like we were walking on the top of the world.
The Himalayan mountains all around us, sheltering that wide valley.
And then a mist rolling in, two young women alone
walking and walking till our water had given out and I wondered if I could put one foot in front of another anymore, and then when we thought we could go no farther, a monastery looming up out of the fog, and Buddhist monks in maroon robes and wide smiles, who gave us yak butter tea and a place to sleep for the night.
Watching the ocean crash on black rocks on the western shore of Ireland. Watching the tide roll in on a beach in Rhode Island.
Emily and Charlotte being born. The days and the nights of mothering. The days and nights of ministry here.
A “children’s home” in Russia with bright blue paint, doctors in white, a room with 50 white iron cribs lined up in rows, a child in each one. Rich and I reaching out our arms towards the boy who has already become, in our hearts, our son, but whom we have not yet seen or touched or held.
The spring I spent in hospitals fighting for my mother’s life, and then the summer when she died and the world changed forever, the way it does when a parent dies.
Touchstones. A spiritual odyssey has touch stones.
These are the ones that floated up for me this week. As me tomorrow, and there might be different ones. I have my touchstones, you have your’s.
Imagine all the stories in this room, right here, right now. Imagine the spiritual odysseys, the touchstones. Imagine if we could share them with one another, as wise women ancestors did in years of old, sitting in a circle, every voice heard. Imagine the energy that would ripple through our community.
“I began to know my story then,” writes Wendell Berry. “....and grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. . . . but grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you . . . . “
Copyright (c) 2010 Jenny M. Rankin.
Sources
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906), p. 31.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p. 197.