“Counting
It All Joy”
11.
The Joy of Being Lost
Exodus 16:1-3
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
September 2, 2007
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I
received this week a letter that touched my heart for its courage and candor.
In it, the writer, a middle-aged woman, said,
“When
I was ten years old I remember lying on the grass, looking up at the night sky,
and thinking for the first time about how insubstantial my little life was.
With that thought came a frightening emptiness - as if gravity had cut me
loose and I was floating in space, untethered.
I went back inside our house and sank gratefully into the now of things:
the familiar sight of my dad paying bills at his desk, my mom knitting, the
beauty of the old warped floors, the smell of home.”
“Lately, I have felt like
that again – untethered. The ways
in which I learned to operate in the first half of my life don’t work for me
anymore. In between moments of
fullness and excitement for this new chapter, I often fall down holes that feel
bottomless. My mistaken belief that
‘strong people don’t experience this’ often has made me feel ashamed.
I haven’t wanted to write about it.”
“And then a book called When
the Heart Waits came as a gift from a friend.
In it, the author, Sue Monk Kidd, writes:
In our youth we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the
mid-life juncture these patterns begin to crumble.
It feels to us like a collapsing
of all that is, but it is a holy quaking.
‘When order crumbles,’ writes John
Shea, ‘mystery rises.’”
“A new definition of
strength has evolved out of this for me.”
“Strength is not always
about bouncing back all bright and smiley; it is more about letting go and
looking around with curiosity and openness.
Strength is allowing the story I tell myself about myself to fall away.
It is about standing tall in this place of ‘not knowing’ and trusting
that the journey down the ‘bottomless hole’ leads to the places that need
looking at and loving.”
“These places have
something important to teach me.” (1)
Annie is telling about an
experience I believe is common to all of us in some way or another at some time
or other in our lives: the experience of being lost.
But she does it in a way that makes of the experience neither catastrophe
nor calamity. Rather, she casts the
experience in the context of joy in the way that we have been speaking of it
this summer…that joy is not a feeling of elation for which we strive, but
comes to us when we open ourselves to the fullness of life, trusting that even
the dark and difficult places will not overwhelm us or undo us but teach us and
make us more human.
How
much we miss in life because we are afraid of being lost!
Most of us like to be in white-knuckled control of our lives and the
thought of the chaos that comes with being lost is something we seek ardently to
avoid. We try to construct our lives
so as to minimize unpleasant surprises and crooked lines and untetherings.
But there is much about ourselves and life that we can find out and
discover only within the experience of being lost, when chaos comes to stay a
spell and unsurety takes up residence in our soul.
When the prodigal son returned
from his ruinous living in the “far country” and his father ordered up a
party extraordinaire against the protests of his elder son, he explained himself
by saying that “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was
lost and has been found.” There
was great rejoicing over the return of the prodigal, but it was in the midst of
his being lost that the prodigal “came to himself” and set a
different course for his life.
One of the Bible’s first
stories has Abraham (Abram) responding to God’s call to him to “go from
your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will
show you.” Forsaking his
comfortable, settled, all-planned-out-in-advance life, Abraham left the life he
always had known to embark on a disquieting and disorienting sojourn to who
knows where. Of Abraham on his
journey it could fairly be said that “he once was found but now is lost.”
But it was in the midst of his lostness that God used him, in
scripture’s words, “to be the one through whom all the families of the
earth shall be blessed.” Indeed,
as Chautauqua’s “Abrahamic Initiative” tries to make clear, the roots of
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can all be traced to Abraham and it is those
common origins that perhaps can become a pathway for peace through which the
whole earth will find blessing. The
Bible says that Abraham was seventy-five when he left the ease of his rocking
chair in
Another archetypical story of
lostness in scripture is the story of the Exodus when Moses led the enslaved
Israelites out of their bondage to Pharaoh toward a Promised Land flowing with
freedom and fortune. Our reading
today is a little slice of that journey telling of the pilgrims’
regress…that is, of the Israelites’ preference when times got tough for the
comfort of their confinement over the liberty of their lostness.
But Moses would not let the people linger or languish in their longing
for the lethargy of Egyptian lentils when they could be eating the manna of
their destiny and fulfillment. He
knew that their wanderings in the wilderness were imperative for helping them to
make their transition from captivity to community, from enslavement to
empowerment, from inevitability to independence.
The Book of Psalms is nothing if
not a liturgy of lostness. “O,
Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do
you hide your face from me? How
long, O Lord? Why do you forsake
me?” Fully two-thirds of the
Psalms are litanies of lament and yet, even so, they are laments offered within
the context of worship where the psalmists know that first and last their lives
have to do with God. So, because
they trust that their lives ultimately are safe in God, they are free to
question their experiences of life, their lostness, their experiences that
hinder or hurt their quest to become more fully and truly human.
Jesus himself was led by the Spirit of God into a desert of lostness prior to the beginning of his public ministry of the gospel. There he was completely undone, forced to face his demons and drama, and to choose the trail he would blaze with his life. Would it be the pathway of convention and custom that would bind and constrain his actions, or would he dare to live into the truth of his life revealed in his inner wrestling, the truth that would set him free and, in the process, help to set so many others free as well? We know what he chose and the only question for us is if we shall listen to his voice that comes echoing through the centuries telling us to do likewise, telling us not to be afraid to make our own forays into desert land, telling us to deal with our own dragons so that our lives, too, might become light and life not only for ourselves but for others.
Kent
Ira Groff, the founder of Oasis Ministries and a retreat leader who several
years ago led a dream workshop for us here in this church, once scribbled a
little personal commentary after reading the parables in Luke 15 about the lost
coin, the lost sheep, and the lost prodigal.
He made this entry in his journal about the joy that comes after engaging
one’s lostness and the discoveries that rise up out of the struggle:
Once
I am found
I need to get lost
Again:
in Wonder
Love and Praise. (2)
Mary Oliver has a poem entitled Morning
in a New Land, that seems true to me about the joy of being lost when it
leads us to struggle toward discovering our own true selves, that leads us to a
new clearing in life, to a new way of seeing and understanding and living in the
world.
Morning
in a New Land
In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, onto the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple grey,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away,
And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift. (3)
I cannot tell you that being lost does not bring with it its share of deep pain and worrisome anxiety, but I can tell you that if you are willing to sit with it for as long as you need to do that, if you do not run back to Egypt when your journey toward freedom becomes uncomfortable, that there will come a day when you will “rub your eyes, listening, parting the leaves, like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.” And it will be like the first morning of a life you never thought you could have, and you, too, finding and being found, will lose yourself again in wonder, love, and praise, and it will be good, very good.
Amen.
(1)
Annie O’Shaughnessy in her “Letters from an Open Heart” in
her online journal entitled Soul Flares (August 29, 2007 issue)
(2)
Mary
Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One.
(3)
Kent Ira Groff, Writing Tides.
© Copyright 2007 First Presbyterian Church