A Reflection for II Lent All Saints’ Church,
Southern Shores, NC
March 16, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
March 16, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
“Through the unknown, remembered gate”
Whenever I really need to find the peace of God, I
walk down to the beach here at the ends of the earth where there is only the
earth on which I stand, the ground of my being, and I look at the vastness of
the ocean and the beauty of the sky and I think, “My Lord God made all this. And what are my problems in comparison to all
this? This is the ocean of God in which all life begins and into which all life
will flow. I am at the starting and the ending. I am standing at the “unknown
remembered gate” and in the “stillness between the two waves of the sea”.” I find peace in that fleeting moment, and it
reminds me of some lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little
Giddings, the fourth part of his Poem, Four
Quartets.
We shall not cease from exploration
 |
| Pat walking on beach after snow |
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
In years gone by, I would go to the mountains in order
to be spiritually refreshed, and I would look at the high peaks and get that
sense of peace. What grandeur, what wonder! I would quote from the opening line
of the King James version of Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine
eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” There was no question about
it for me - I just stopped at the first line because the mountains gave me all
the peace I needed at the time. All I wanted to do was to stay on the surface
with a passive God of nature. Mountains are good metaphors for moving into the
numinous because, from the beginning of time, most religions have placed their
holy sites and altars on top of mountains, or in buildings shaped like
mountains, thrusting out of the limits of the earth where it touches the sky.
We still have remnants of that pre-Christian archetypal symbol in church spires
and steeples.
As I progressed in my spiritual
journey, I read past the first line and saw that the Psalmist went beyond the
mountain and said that help does not come just from the hills but from the
presence of the LORD, the Maker of Heaven and earth. This Psalm is one of 8 Psalms called “Songs of
Ascent” which people were to sing as they went up to the Holy Space. Central to the idea of pilgrimage is that one
has to leave one’s place of residence and journey to find the Holy Space. I
have made pilgrimages to High Holy Spaces to see the one God in all sorts of
places where all sorts of faithful go - the Muslim Temple Mount in Jerusalem,
Eastern Orthodox Monasteries hanging off cliff sides in the Judean Wilderness,
Mayan Step Temples in Central America, Pyramids in Egypt, Roman Catholic
Chapels in Hill Cities in Italy, different Denominational Mountain Top Chapels
in our country. One of these days when I get rich and famous, I am going to go to
Ayers Rock in Australia, Mount Fuji in Japan, Denali in Alaska, and the Shwe dagon Pagoda in Yangon in
the country formerly known as Burma.
Pilgrimages are intentional, time-limited
metaphors of our life-long journey into relationship with God. We have choices in how we do these enacted
metaphors; the most popular idea is to come to these places as a tourist to
find out more information or to collect experiences. There is a moment when I
love to touch the rocks and connect to centuries of people coming to Holy
Spaces and the History books come alive.
However, this tourist moment fades and
is replaced by openness to asking God to change me seeing my life as just
collecting experiences and things. In those fleeting moments I know I will go
home, but home will be different because I am different. Every trip I take, I
come home across the bridge and Pat and I hoot in thanksgiving for ending the
journey, but I am different. To revisit Eliot;
However, this tourist moment fades and
is replaced by openness to asking God to change me seeing my life as just
collecting experiences and things. In those fleeting moments I know I will go
home, but home will be different because I am different. Every trip I take, I
come home across the bridge and Pat and I hoot in thanksgiving for ending the
journey, but I am different. To revisit Eliot;
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.
In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today from
Genesis, Abram has a visit from God. I think it is a vision or dream - come on,
you knew that a dream would come into this sermon - a dream in which God calls
him to enter into such a journey to a place far from home and which will never
be a comfortable home for him. Yet, it is the journey of faithfully not knowing
that is important, rather than the destination one can claim. He does not know
where he is going and yet he goes, one foot in front of another in ignorance
and faithfulness. His journey is much like that of the 11th Century
Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm, who had an active love of God and was seeking
a deeper knowledge of God. He wrote: "Nor do I seek to understand that I
may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe,
that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand." So also Abram does not understand and
therefore enter into faith, rather he enters into faith in order to eventually stand
under but almost never fully understand the “Absolute Paradox” that is God. In
this situation one does not do a “leap of faith” but what Kierkegaard calls a “leap
to faith”. Abram is on his journey,
his pilgrimage, a pilgrimage he will never finish in his lifetime. However, at
the end of his journeys, he returns to where he began - in union with the God
he can never fully understand.
The lesson from John’s Gospel about Nicodemus
visiting Jesus is also, I think, a dream, for it says that Nicodemus “comes at
night to visit Jesus”. In the ten times in my ordained ministry over the last
30 years that I have preached about this story, I was literal and assumed that
Nicodemus didn’t go in the daylight because he was afraid of disapproval from
his fellow teachers. But my latest
theory is that John collected stories about Jesus as he put together the Gospel,
and Nicodemus gave his story about his first call to follow Jesus from a dream he
had about beginning a journey to go God knows where. Nicodemus doesn’t understand anything that is
said in the dream. The story is like a conversation in which symbols and puns
abound in the dialogue and there is no real coherent give and take, as
questions are answered with other questions as people speak past each other. But Nicodemus makes the leap to faith at the
beginning of his pilgrimage to believe in a deeper dimension of life, a
pilgrimage that, hopefully, he will never finish in his lifetime, but he will
arrive where he began - in union with the God he can never fully understand.
Most of us in this church came here from somewhere else;
as we left the places we knew and came to find a deeper dimension of life. It
is a journey, and my prayer for us is that we will never end this journey in
our lifetimes but keep going deeper until we will arrive where we began - in
union with God who we can never fully understand.
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