Reflection for II Lent All Saints’ Church,
Southern Shores, NC
February 21, 2016 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Odyssey
The question I posed in the bulletin for mediation
during the quiet time before the service is “Where are you on your spiritual
journey of Lent?” I tend to see things as voyages a lot right now. When I was
visiting my daughter earlier this month, I spent a great deal of time waiting
and reading things like Homer’s Odyssey.
My daughter had given me a Great Courses CD series of lectures on the Odyssey for Christmas and I had fallen
behind in my studies, so in my quiet time there, I read a few different
translations and a dramatic adaptation written by one of my son-in law’s
professors at Northwestern and in which he appeared.
The Odyssey
is about Odysseus and his journey, but it is also about all of the journeys of
us frail creatures. Homer says “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred
that is weaker than (hu)man.” In the
story, the Gods do both help and hinder Odysseus, but the Gods do not cause
most of the difficulties, as they warn:
Mortals are so quick to blame the gods: they say
that we devise their misery. But they
themselves - in their depravity - design
grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.
The Genesis lesson is about Abram being reassured by
God on Abram’s life-long journey to find a place to call his own and live into
the promise. The passage starts off with the central message of scripture,
“Don't be afraid.” The Psalm tells us not to rush through the journey out of
fear, but we are to “be strong and God shall comfort your heart* wait patiently
for the LORD.” The Epistle lesson is to the Philippians who are on their
journey of faith as Paul urges them to keep firm in their joyful faith, “Don't
be afraid.” The Gospel lesson is about Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem to fulfill
his destiny. He is warned about Herod, but he rejects traveling with fear even
as he knows his journey will take him into danger. He will tell others what he
has heard God say to him, “Don't be afraid.”
Each of the stories is about living fearlessly into
who we are on our life journeys; the purpose of all of these journeys is not
the destination but the uncovering of the deeper meaning in ourselves. As T.S.
Eliot says in Little Gidding, “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.”
Our journeys are never straight lines but rather
spirals going deeper and deeper until we come to the place where the Great “I
am” of God dwells within the “I am” of each of us. “The Christ in me greets the
Christ in you” we act out in each service when we exchange the Peace of Christ
with each other and whenever we do ministry in and out of the church.
Every time I think I have reached the deepest destination
of my spiritual journey, I find a new invitation to go deeper. I find those
invitations when I realize that I am getting anxious about my own limitations
of control over people, places, and things I cannot fix. When I reach the
limits of my control, I come to the boundaries of my fear where I need to hear
the central message “Don't be afraid.”
A clue to this invitation is in my dreams. There is
a theme that keeps coming back in my dreams when I start to feel smug about how
I have it made. In these dreams I am in a church building on my way to the main
sanctuary to lead a service, or in a classroom building where I am to go to a
lecture hall to teach, or in a theatre on my way to a stage, situations where
there is one more hallway to walk down, but it turns into another and then
another. Or, in another dream, there I am on second base in a baseball game and
I am running to third and as I am rounding third heading for home plate, the
distance gets longer and longer. I used to wake up in a turmoil of frustration
about not reaching my goal, but now I realize these nightmares are my friends,
telling me the truth that my deepest yearning to be united with God gets
hijacked when I want to be God
instead of placing myself in God's hands and heart. It is a besetting confusion
of thinking that fear can only be put aside when I am in control, for the more
I try to control, the more fear dominates me.
As I was
reflecting on my own spiritual journey, I came across a poem, Journey Home, by
Rabindranath Tagore, a late 19th and early 20th Century
Nobel Prize winning poet from Bengal.
“The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my
voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself,
and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,
and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said `Here art thou!'
The question and the cry `Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand
streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance `I am!'”
We are all on a journey, an odyssey; don’t be
afraid.
OdysseySnowing it was, topping earlier ice as I went walking,Yes, one step carefully, without hurry, and then another,and more and so it goes; old man tentative steps ratherthan the young man in a hurry posture, all risk mocking.Except this time seems different because now listening,hearing the earth shiver with delight as she welcomingsteps taken instead of hibernating sloth unquestioning.Each step one more way of living into my christening.Our odysseys ne’er seem to be journey of straight lines,but spirals, twisting, so gyrating on to themselves untilreaching beginnings which some remembrances do fillwith the harvest of plans maturing into silky red wines.Symbols poured out for us for the paths we off strayedand eating bread symbols so that we will not be afraid.
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