Come Home
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 5, 2021
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
It was a beautiful fall afternoon. The air was crisp, the sky blue and nearly cloudless. Shafts of bright sunlight pierced the thinning canopy of yellow, gold and orange leaves, raking across the rough bark of column-like trees creating the impression one was walking through a massive cathedral of infinite proportions aglow in heavenly light.
One could hardly imagine a better day for hiking in the woods. And so as I and some friends reached the summit of a steep cliff and paused to take in the wide vista of the rolling hills and reservoir far below we decided to venture further into the woods rather than head back as we had always done in the past after reaching this particular spot. So on we went, noting the trail markers as we passed them venturing deeper into the woods.
At some point we became aware the sunlight, which had seemed so bright earlier had dimmed considerable and the trees which had previously seemed to unfold before us like great pillars bathed in light, now seemed to close in around us, like bars around an ever shrinking and darkening cage. Realizing the sun was quickly setting, we turned and began a decidedly more hurried attempt to get out of the woods and to our car before dark.
The trail markers, easy visible at midday, were barely discernible at dusk. And despite our effort, time was not on our side and we spent the last ten minutes or so of the hike fumbling in the woods in near total darkness before finally emerging just a little ways down the street from where we had parked our car earlier in the day.
Now, I don’t know what it was like for you hearing this story, but in retelling it, I started to feel something right here (area of the heart). A feeling of anxiety leaning toward dread as we began to fear we may become lost in a place we thought we knew.
When this feeling arises in relation to our lives and the human condition, we call this feeling angst. Angst is often defined as, “A feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.” An uncomfortable feeling, it often arises when we feel lost in one way or another.
Enter religion.
We modern folk like to poke fun sometimes at our seemingly less sophisticated, less scientifically knowledgable ancestors who, to our mind, invented the improbable stories included in the canon of the world’s religions simply to explain things they couldn’t understand. We know better now, or so we think.
Yet all our advanced multidisciplinary knowledge hasn’t liberated us from the experience of angst. Rather, the depth and breadth of modern interest in spirituality even in the midst of movement away from organized religion, suggests an ever growing and diverse population hungry for a pathway out of the darkened woods of contemporary life…a pathway out of the anxiety and dread that overcomes us when we wake up one day and realize we don’t recognize the life or the world we’re living in.
Attempts to satisfy this spiritual hunger experienced as angst take several forms…which can be broken down into three broad actions, squelch, seek and serve.
Squelching, as you might imagine, is an attempt to ignore or pretend our spiritual hunger doesn’t exist. For the person who squelches, time given to things like a stilling one’s mind, reflection, discernment or self-discovery is time wasted.
Not taking time for these shields a person, if not from seeing, then from wrestling honestly and mercifully, with the inconsistencies between a script they’re performing day after day and the life within them aching to be lived. Something, ironically, we like watching others wrestle with, especially this time of year, whether through classics like Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” or a cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie.
People who seek, on the other hand, are aware to some degree or another of their spiritual hunger, though it may not always be recognized as spiritual. As the word suggests, those who seek, primarily seek ways to alleviate their hunger largely through consumption and acquisition. Consumption of products or services and acquisition of material goods, credentials, titles and other boosters of social status.
The things consumed or acquired can be secular, spiritual, or religious in nature, it doesn’t matter, so long as they give one the sense of taking charge or gaining control of life. Those who seek commonly find some relief, but like the disclaimer on many an over-the-counter remedy warns, it only provides temporary relief. And indeed next time may require something more in the way of quantity or novelty to continue its effectiveness.
Then there’s people who serve. They experience spiritual hunger as angst too and may or may not recognize it as spiritual. But, experiencing it as a vague need to be attended to, they turn their attention toward it rather than try and squelch it or seek to consume or acquire things to make it go away. These are often the people who show up at church either for the first time or after being away from spirituality explored and practiced in community, (a.k.a. religion) hoping to discover and serve, that is, attend to, this need. To find out what it is and what it wants more than how to ignore it or make it go away. Maybe this resonates with some of you here this morning.
Indeed, one of the purposes of religion, of spirituality explored and practiced in community, including the familiar stories, observances, rituals, and spiritual practices that shape it and that we too frequently overlook, is not simply to provide an alternative lens through which we might navigate life’s challenges, but to reunite us with the life within us waiting to be lived, that we might live the truth of who we are.
And this begins with an invitation, “Come home.”
Indeed, that angst I characterized as spiritual hunger could also be described as an ache for home. The poet Maya Angelou defines this home for which we all ache as, “The place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” In short, where we know and experience love unconditionally.
But, oh how easily we dismiss and forget. How anxiously we grasp at rationalizations in the midst of our existential discomfort and confusion. How impatient we are with the life within that has, conversely, kept our memory, exhibited faith, and remained stalwart in it’s waiting for our return home.
We seek and squelch, creating and critiquing, joining and rejecting and inevitably slip into the tired and faithless practice of sorting others and ourselves into the worthy and unworthy, declaring in our minds and dogmas, this is sacred, that isn't. This person is holy, that person isn't. This is me, that is not.
All the while the life within us waits.
Patiently it awaits the day we tire of sorting, the day an insight, like that expressed in a few, brief lines from Rabia of Basra, the female Islamic Sufi saint, who lived in the 8th C. (some five hundred years before Rumi), an insight that cuts through our defenses and exposes the folly of trying so hard to categorize, figure out, and find who and what is sacred. “I tried painting”, she writes, “but it was easier to fly slicing potatoes.”
Her words remind me of a time I was berating myself harshly to my late mentor over something I had said or done. After doing a number on myself my mentor asked, “If a parishioner came to you with the same issue would you berate them like this?” I immediately responded, “No, of course not.” He paused, then looked directly at me and said, “So, what makes you so special?” It was just the kick in the pants I needed to get over my myself, my ideas of who or what a minister is or isn’t, and move on.
My mentor’s words, like Rabia’s, reminds us when we loosen our grip on our often lofty conceptions or who or what is sacred, worthy, lovable, we free ourselves to acknowledge and accept the invitation to come home. Home where we can go as we are and not be questioned, and not just us, but others as well. Home thus becomes not a place we alone travel to, but that we can bring with us and to others wherever we go.
A point made in the beautiful story from Meister Eckhart that was our second reading. Life, he reminds us can be hard work. And life’s “worries”, he notes, “As we all know, can be more exhausting than physical labor.”
Worry, angst’s constant companion, is a form a fear. And love is the antidote for fear.
In the story, the kind monk who visits the burro in her stable doesn’t size her up ahead of time. He doesn’t fixate on thoughts of good burros and bad burros. He doesn’t ponder her usefulness to the community. He doesn’t wonder if she really deserves the pear he’s bringing her, let alone his attention. He shows no forethought of how grateful or indebted to him she will or should be after he leaves. There’s no indication that he’s entered the stable swelled with pride, impressed by his own unique goodness. Instead, he brings her a pear, looks into her eyes, and touches her ears. He sees her. He really sees her… not as a conception, an object or situation to be evaluated or questioned, but as she is. And there, in the stable, life greets life. And in that moment there is only love. Both monk and burro, members of one family, have come home.
Come home. This is, in a sense, what every religion invites us to do.
And while at the surface, the precise directions may differ and the paths diverge in significant ways, underneath, from the Islam of Rabia of Barsa to the Catholicism of Meister Eckhart, to our own Unitarian Universalism, a common current flows. A common current that stresses receptivity over restriction. Receptivity for which we must prepare by emptying ourselves of tightly held, reactive, and comfortable conceptions which hide, divert, and otherwise block our pathway home.
And so as we enter a holiday season of much preparing let us take time to consider the obstacles blocking our own path home as individuals and a community that we might clear the path to receive an indwelling of Love, Truth, Light, and Hope, our reunion with the life within us patiently waiting to be lived all year round. A life free, at home, in love. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 5, 2021
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
It was a beautiful fall afternoon. The air was crisp, the sky blue and nearly cloudless. Shafts of bright sunlight pierced the thinning canopy of yellow, gold and orange leaves, raking across the rough bark of column-like trees creating the impression one was walking through a massive cathedral of infinite proportions aglow in heavenly light.
One could hardly imagine a better day for hiking in the woods. And so as I and some friends reached the summit of a steep cliff and paused to take in the wide vista of the rolling hills and reservoir far below we decided to venture further into the woods rather than head back as we had always done in the past after reaching this particular spot. So on we went, noting the trail markers as we passed them venturing deeper into the woods.
At some point we became aware the sunlight, which had seemed so bright earlier had dimmed considerable and the trees which had previously seemed to unfold before us like great pillars bathed in light, now seemed to close in around us, like bars around an ever shrinking and darkening cage. Realizing the sun was quickly setting, we turned and began a decidedly more hurried attempt to get out of the woods and to our car before dark.
The trail markers, easy visible at midday, were barely discernible at dusk. And despite our effort, time was not on our side and we spent the last ten minutes or so of the hike fumbling in the woods in near total darkness before finally emerging just a little ways down the street from where we had parked our car earlier in the day.
Now, I don’t know what it was like for you hearing this story, but in retelling it, I started to feel something right here (area of the heart). A feeling of anxiety leaning toward dread as we began to fear we may become lost in a place we thought we knew.
When this feeling arises in relation to our lives and the human condition, we call this feeling angst. Angst is often defined as, “A feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.” An uncomfortable feeling, it often arises when we feel lost in one way or another.
Enter religion.
We modern folk like to poke fun sometimes at our seemingly less sophisticated, less scientifically knowledgable ancestors who, to our mind, invented the improbable stories included in the canon of the world’s religions simply to explain things they couldn’t understand. We know better now, or so we think.
Yet all our advanced multidisciplinary knowledge hasn’t liberated us from the experience of angst. Rather, the depth and breadth of modern interest in spirituality even in the midst of movement away from organized religion, suggests an ever growing and diverse population hungry for a pathway out of the darkened woods of contemporary life…a pathway out of the anxiety and dread that overcomes us when we wake up one day and realize we don’t recognize the life or the world we’re living in.
Attempts to satisfy this spiritual hunger experienced as angst take several forms…which can be broken down into three broad actions, squelch, seek and serve.
Squelching, as you might imagine, is an attempt to ignore or pretend our spiritual hunger doesn’t exist. For the person who squelches, time given to things like a stilling one’s mind, reflection, discernment or self-discovery is time wasted.
Not taking time for these shields a person, if not from seeing, then from wrestling honestly and mercifully, with the inconsistencies between a script they’re performing day after day and the life within them aching to be lived. Something, ironically, we like watching others wrestle with, especially this time of year, whether through classics like Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” or a cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie.
People who seek, on the other hand, are aware to some degree or another of their spiritual hunger, though it may not always be recognized as spiritual. As the word suggests, those who seek, primarily seek ways to alleviate their hunger largely through consumption and acquisition. Consumption of products or services and acquisition of material goods, credentials, titles and other boosters of social status.
The things consumed or acquired can be secular, spiritual, or religious in nature, it doesn’t matter, so long as they give one the sense of taking charge or gaining control of life. Those who seek commonly find some relief, but like the disclaimer on many an over-the-counter remedy warns, it only provides temporary relief. And indeed next time may require something more in the way of quantity or novelty to continue its effectiveness.
Then there’s people who serve. They experience spiritual hunger as angst too and may or may not recognize it as spiritual. But, experiencing it as a vague need to be attended to, they turn their attention toward it rather than try and squelch it or seek to consume or acquire things to make it go away. These are often the people who show up at church either for the first time or after being away from spirituality explored and practiced in community, (a.k.a. religion) hoping to discover and serve, that is, attend to, this need. To find out what it is and what it wants more than how to ignore it or make it go away. Maybe this resonates with some of you here this morning.
Indeed, one of the purposes of religion, of spirituality explored and practiced in community, including the familiar stories, observances, rituals, and spiritual practices that shape it and that we too frequently overlook, is not simply to provide an alternative lens through which we might navigate life’s challenges, but to reunite us with the life within us waiting to be lived, that we might live the truth of who we are.
And this begins with an invitation, “Come home.”
Indeed, that angst I characterized as spiritual hunger could also be described as an ache for home. The poet Maya Angelou defines this home for which we all ache as, “The place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” In short, where we know and experience love unconditionally.
But, oh how easily we dismiss and forget. How anxiously we grasp at rationalizations in the midst of our existential discomfort and confusion. How impatient we are with the life within that has, conversely, kept our memory, exhibited faith, and remained stalwart in it’s waiting for our return home.
We seek and squelch, creating and critiquing, joining and rejecting and inevitably slip into the tired and faithless practice of sorting others and ourselves into the worthy and unworthy, declaring in our minds and dogmas, this is sacred, that isn't. This person is holy, that person isn't. This is me, that is not.
All the while the life within us waits.
Patiently it awaits the day we tire of sorting, the day an insight, like that expressed in a few, brief lines from Rabia of Basra, the female Islamic Sufi saint, who lived in the 8th C. (some five hundred years before Rumi), an insight that cuts through our defenses and exposes the folly of trying so hard to categorize, figure out, and find who and what is sacred. “I tried painting”, she writes, “but it was easier to fly slicing potatoes.”
Her words remind me of a time I was berating myself harshly to my late mentor over something I had said or done. After doing a number on myself my mentor asked, “If a parishioner came to you with the same issue would you berate them like this?” I immediately responded, “No, of course not.” He paused, then looked directly at me and said, “So, what makes you so special?” It was just the kick in the pants I needed to get over my myself, my ideas of who or what a minister is or isn’t, and move on.
My mentor’s words, like Rabia’s, reminds us when we loosen our grip on our often lofty conceptions or who or what is sacred, worthy, lovable, we free ourselves to acknowledge and accept the invitation to come home. Home where we can go as we are and not be questioned, and not just us, but others as well. Home thus becomes not a place we alone travel to, but that we can bring with us and to others wherever we go.
A point made in the beautiful story from Meister Eckhart that was our second reading. Life, he reminds us can be hard work. And life’s “worries”, he notes, “As we all know, can be more exhausting than physical labor.”
Worry, angst’s constant companion, is a form a fear. And love is the antidote for fear.
In the story, the kind monk who visits the burro in her stable doesn’t size her up ahead of time. He doesn’t fixate on thoughts of good burros and bad burros. He doesn’t ponder her usefulness to the community. He doesn’t wonder if she really deserves the pear he’s bringing her, let alone his attention. He shows no forethought of how grateful or indebted to him she will or should be after he leaves. There’s no indication that he’s entered the stable swelled with pride, impressed by his own unique goodness. Instead, he brings her a pear, looks into her eyes, and touches her ears. He sees her. He really sees her… not as a conception, an object or situation to be evaluated or questioned, but as she is. And there, in the stable, life greets life. And in that moment there is only love. Both monk and burro, members of one family, have come home.
Come home. This is, in a sense, what every religion invites us to do.
And while at the surface, the precise directions may differ and the paths diverge in significant ways, underneath, from the Islam of Rabia of Barsa to the Catholicism of Meister Eckhart, to our own Unitarian Universalism, a common current flows. A common current that stresses receptivity over restriction. Receptivity for which we must prepare by emptying ourselves of tightly held, reactive, and comfortable conceptions which hide, divert, and otherwise block our pathway home.
And so as we enter a holiday season of much preparing let us take time to consider the obstacles blocking our own path home as individuals and a community that we might clear the path to receive an indwelling of Love, Truth, Light, and Hope, our reunion with the life within us patiently waiting to be lived all year round. A life free, at home, in love. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be