“Arriving
Where We Started”
Luke 15:11-24
First Presbyterian
I am in a stage of my life in which I want to make better acquaintance with myself. Most of us, and I surely am included, spend an inordinate amount of our lives listening to voices other than our own and too often we allow those voices - the needs, desires, and expectations of others - to disproportionately shape our lives. Those other voices also can be the siren calls of temptations to live in ways and for purposes that promise much and deliver little in terms of joy or personal authenticity. I am resonating more and more these days with Mary Oliver’s poem entitled “The Journey” in which she says…
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
(-found in New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, by Mary Oliver, p.
114)
Perhaps it comes at different
times for each of us, the realization that the deepest truth about ourselves
cannot be found “out there” in the world beyond us, but only within us.
But it is a realization we have to make if we are going to grow as truly
and fully into our own personhood, into our humanity, as possible….something
that is viscerally and vitally important for us to do as I agree wholeheartedly
with St. Irenaeus who declared that “the glory of God is a human being
fully alive.” No wonder Jesus
of Nazareth is so often called “God’s glory.”
We have soul work to do.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her “Letter to a Young Activist During
Troubled Times” writes that “the light of the soul throws sparks,
sends up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire.
To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these…is of
(great) necessity. Struggling souls
catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.
If you would help to calm the tumult (of the world), this is one of the
strongest things you can do.” Rosa
Parks, who single-handedly advanced the cause of civil rights in this country by
refusing to give up her seat on a
There is a way of understanding
Christian faith that is called “esoteric” or “inner” Christianity.
Inner Christianity interprets scripture as the story of the interior
journeys of our lives. Because many
of us do not do as much “inner work” as we do outer work - dealing with and
responding to the external elements of our lives - such an interpretation can
seem cryptic. So, esoterically, for
instance, the parable of the prodigal son becomes a description of the
wanderings of our lives that carry us away from our own true selves, enticed by
allurements that promise us that our needs will be met by “things” outside
of ourselves – wealth, acquisitions, accumulations, degrees, reputations,
relationships – and how we often ignore the deeper claims of our souls on us.
I love how so many of you get involved in the preaching ministry of our church, at least indirectly. Last Sunday, David and Juanell Boyd, who are friends of our church who make their year round home near Princeton, New Jersey but, through their association with Chautauqua, have found our church and love it as so many Chautauquans do, gave Cindy and me a piece of music they thought we might enjoy. They entitled the accompanying note, “Because of Tom’s propensity to preach on the prodigal son.” I have asked Cyndi Lorenc to sing the song for us this morning, but I want to set it up for you before she does. The words are in your bulletin, and I want you to hear them with an esoteric ear…and so the first stanza I want you to hear as you and me waking up to the reality that we have not been faithful to our own true selves and confessing such to our soul, that we too frequently have strayed from the pleadings and guidance of our souls that are, of course, the place where God lives within us. The second stanza of the song is the soul’s assurance, and thus also God’s, that it is never too late to come to ourselves, to come home to the truth of our lives.
If I ran away today, If you ran away today,
If I made you cry, If you made me cry,
If I traveled far and wide, If you traveled far and wide,
And never told you why, And never told me why,
If I found the times were hard But if you found the times were hard
And I was all alone And you were all alone
Could I still come home to you, I hope that you’d come home, my child,
Could I still come home? I’d hope that you’d come home.
Could I knock upon your door You could knock upon my door
And would you let me in? I’d run to let you in,
Would you be glad to see me I’d be so glad to see you
Even though I’d been so long, No matter where you’d been,
So long, so long away from home, So glad, so glad to have you home,
So long, so long away from home? So glad, so glad to have you home.
The parable of the prodigal son,
understood esoterically, is in large part about our coming home to our own true
selves, beginning to understand our own true nature, and living authentically
the life we are given to live, contributing our own unique verse to the poetry
of God’s unfolding creation and to our common life.
There always will be people around us, like the elder brother in the
parable, who will not be happy if we do that because it interferes with what
they need or want us to do or to be in order to maintain the equilibrium of
their own lives. Never mind them.
God delights every time that any of us who are lost to ourselves begins
finding our true way, when any of us who feels the deadening weight of living
according to the expectations of others begins to throw off those shackles and
comes to life. Born again, indeed.
I have a friend who says the
same thing a little differently. She
tells of a summer fifteen years ago or so during which she became consumed with
picking up shards of broken glass from the soil in her backyard, an obsession,
she says, that called to her like a bird is called to fly south for the winter.
It felt instinctual and necessary. Day
after day she kept at it, buying two large baskets into which to collect the
broken pieces, and then one day it occurred to her what she was doing.
She began to weep as she realized that she was picking up the shattered
pieces of herself, of her own life. As
she continued to do so throughout the summer, she gave sacred thought to what it
meant to be “gathering herself up,” to be coming home to her own divine
center, to begin caring and tending to the healing and redirecting of her own
life, for her own sake and then, also, for the sake of the world around her that
needed the gifts that only being her own authentic self could bestow.
I can imagine Cindy saying it
this way if she had the pulpit this morning: Listen to the melody deep in your
own heart, which is where your soul resides, and dance to the song of the Spirit
you hear there. Listen to your life,
to your life.
Finding myself now firmly in
middle age, I know that I too often have lived far away from home and that
homecoming is, finally, the great work of my life, of our lives…because,
without being our own true selves, the gifts that we uniquely have been given
cannot come to their full expression and both we and the world suffer because of
it.
So, dear family and friends, I lift up for you the journey inward, so that what we live and give outwardly may be rich and full and true. Perhaps the inward journey, the coming home to ourselves, sounds selfish. But it is not. It is essential, for without knowing ourselves deeply, we cannot be for the world and for others all that we can be. I commend to you the spirit, the healing, and the joy of the arduous but wondrous journey of self-discovery expressed by T. S. Eliot when he said that
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(-from Four Quartets)
May that be so for you, for me,
for us.
Amen.