Our faith attracts searchers. We tend to attract people who are more than willing to go on an expedition to discover true meaning, people who are willing to question, people who do not take the standard answers given for granted. In short, we are a people of direct experience. For it to be real for us, it must be part of our experience, part of our life. I’ve always admired this very much, and I’ve admired the people I meet who are searching for something true and beautiful. I do think that truth that has the potential to change our lives, comes to us personally in our own experience, in its own time. It doesn’t matter if you’ve studied for it or not, whether you go to church every Sunday or not – the truth of our life is manifesting right now in the place where we stand.
Peter Matthiessen went on a pilgrimage to discover the truth of his life. He tagged along with a naturalist to the mountains in Nepal, to try to catch a glimpse of the rare snow leopard. The rarity and beauty of this snow leopard compels him. He is told by his guide that only two white people have been recorded to have seen this cat face to face in the wild.
This makes the search even more compelling for him – he wants to catch a glimpse of a beauty that has never been seen by most people, something rare and precious, exotic.
What he discovers along the way is a kinship with the mountain he travels on. He discovers the truth of his life in the cold, eating simple meals, on the search. He discovers the mountain is his true home. In that discovery, he feels a sense of spiritual settling, a sense that he is right where he needs to be. He is home.
Like most of our journeys, his was motivated by heartbreak. His young wife had recently died in a hospital in New York City. They were both students of Zen Buddhism. As she was dying, he promised he would search without ceasing to find the spiritual answers he craved. That desire led to the pilgrimage.
Sometimes I think it is possible, even necessary to go far afield from anything we know to get a glimpse of our spirit. I think it is harder for some of us to do it in our common lives here. I had someone ask me recently how ministry is going in Youngstown, and I told them – “It’s great, Everything feels new.”
I have had the opportunity to discover parts of myself in these last few months, clarifying aspects of my life that I have not been made known in other places.
I think it is always possible to find what we need in the place where we are, even if those answers lead us to other places. I find it moving and kind of hilarious that many of us are drawn to search for something rare and exotic, and in the process discover that what we seek is right under our feet. It’s literally held in the depths of the earth. It’s true if we’re in Nepal. It’s true here in Youngstown.
Spring is here for now. We’ve had a couple warm and gorgeous days, and after snow flurries of late, I definitely don’t take this for granted. It was wonderful to see people outside again, working in their gardens, exercising, going on walks. We were all enjoying the splendors of the earth together.
Even though I grew up in Oregon, one of the most varied and beautiful states in our union, I’ve mostly taken the earth for granted. I was always more drawn to the city – toward culture, architecture, humankind’s folly attempt to create a society.
I’ve appreciated convenience – farmers who worked hard to cultivate crops and sell to distributors so I could pick them up in a supermarket right down the street. It would be fair to say I appreciated the earth, but from a distance. I’ve only felt a kind of intimacy with the earth the last couple years.
For the most part, I see I’ve treated the earth as a pretty backdrop for my search. I too have been searching for my own version of the snow leopard, but I’ve rarely noticed the mountain I’ve trodded on. I’ve been so single focused on my search at times that it did not seem to make much difference where I was.
Right now I feel ready to make a shift in how I search. I’m willing to take my gaze away for a second from the horizon, and notice where I am. And where I am is beautiful. This is truly a beautiful place – sitting on my porch and watching the cardinals and the squirrels, I’m allowing myself to feel the sun, and notice the flowers that are beginning to bud. It sounds silly even talking about it, but I think it’s because it’s not what I’m accustomed to. It’s a shift to trust that perhaps what I’m seeking is where I am.
The future of our planet depends on this kind of trust. You have probably heard all the scary statistics about climate change, and now scientists have joined the narratives of religion in predicting the end of the world. You can track devastation of resources, of our animal life, and our environment, most of it caused by humans like us – and it can discourage us to the point that we’re willing to look elsewhere. You see this happening in films and tv shows like Interstellar, Westworld and Downsizing – storylines that imagine we will live the better part of our days in virtual created worlds. We see stories that imagine drastic lifestyle changes to enable our survival, or even the possibility of occupying other planets.. In may be for us in the future, as we look toward the horizon.
I’ve decided to take the opposite approach. I’ve decided not to look elsewhere and imagine other worlds. I’ve decided to finally, for the first time, to stubbornly commit myself to this one. This does not mean I have found a way to mitigate disaster, but I do know one thing. As humans, we are not reasonable creatures. We have the capacity for reason, but reason is rarely the primary motivator for our behavior.
We will not change our behavior because of scary statistics. History has proven this. We will only change if the truth of what is happening comes into our direct experience.
This is why I commit myself now to take time to be awed and amazed, to let the beauty of this place touch me, not just on a superficial level. Without people like you and I who have this capacity to let the earth touch our bodies and our hearts, our home will be gone. And the saddest part is not the end of this world. The saddest part for me is that for many of us, we would have lived on this fragile, beautiful place with minimal attention. Maybe if we traveled to the Grand Canyon or Nepal we could recall special, rare moments of beauty and staggering connection, but what about the bulk of our life, in this place, in Youngstown.
I know there are many people here who are way ahead of me on this – who for decades have cared for and appreciated the earth. You’ve tended to flowers, even making the outside of this church more lively and beautiful. You travel to national parks – you take time to savor this earth. To those people I say thank you – you are offering people like me a great teaching, perhaps our greatest teaching.
Through your love and care and appreciation you are teaching that we need not look toward other worlds to find heaven…with patience and attention…we can discover it here.
This is the fundamental truth of our faith. We are one people who share a common destiny. Right now our destiny is right here, right now, on this blue boat home. Our home is very similar to us – vulnerable, unpredictable, strong, and awesome beyond our intellectual understanding. Many of us come to church like this because we are looking for home. We may think of home like the rare snow leopard – it’s out there waiting for us to catch a glimpse of it. We would sail the world in search of it if that’s what it takes.
The trickier path, and the path that holds great promise, is to dare the snow leopard to come to us – to lure it toward us. We wait for the earth to show us its splendor and wonder in the place where we are, not in the place we imagine we could be. We let the birth of Spring wow us, and entice us once again. We know it happens every year, but for how many more years?
Instead of this weighing us down with dread imagining the end, we can feel motivated to savor the ground we stand on, knowing it is indeed a precious and rare opportunity to be alive as a human being in the time we live in. This savoring is the promise of our future, trust me. With awe and beauty and wonder as our guides, wherever we go, we will always be right where we need to be. On the ground we stand on – We will be home.
