SACRED SPACE

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

3 June 2001

One image from last weekend’s Sandy Island experience particularly holds itself in my consciousness. A small child, maybe three, possibly a tad younger, a large daisy painted on her plump cheek, in her left hand a straggly feather that she waves like a wand, marching deliberately toward the older children up at the bocce ball courts. For me, as I think about it, that was Sandy Island in all its glory.

But before expanding on that image, first just the briefest reflections on how I came to be there this last weekend in the rain and clouds and oh so crowded dinning hall. The process, as many here know, within our Unitarian Universalist Association by which a congregation and a minister choose each other takes at minimum about a year and costs quite a bit of money. And when the search for a minister follows a particularly long ministry, as was the case here at FUSN, the process quite commonly stretches out for two years.

With all this time and expense, you can imagine the pressures put upon the committee selected to find the minister, as well as on the ministers considering their own moves, to find that best possible fit. No one wants to have to start over again, certainly not in any thing like the near future. So, among other things there are lots of hard questions asked by all parties.

I remember how during pre-candidating, the penultimate moment before a search committee offers a specific minister the chance of meeting the congregation for that final decision, how the FUSN search committee informed me of the two annual all-church rustic retreats, one in Maine and the other New Hampshire. I replied I don’t do camping. To which I was told, oh that’s too bad, because our next minister does.

As the smallest of asides, I must admit that no one from the committee now admits to ever asking such a question, much less giving that response. But, I was there. And now, I am here, reporting back from my second grand adventure in the wilderness, this time from Sandy Island, nestled in beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee, in the Granite state of New Hampshire.

The joke contest grand winner set much of the stage about all this for me. It seems that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were camping. In the middle of the night both men awoke with a start. Holmes said to Watson, "As you look up at the sky, what do you divine?"

Watson contemplated the starry night for a few moments and said, "Well, at least three things. Astrologically, I see we’re entering Libra. Scientifically, I see how we are such a small part of the great mystery that is the cosmos. And spiritually, in this incredible beauty I behold what must surely be the hand of God." To which Holmes replied, "Yes, Watson. And do you remember we went to sleep in a tent?"

There is mystery and majesty and more than a few laughs when we go camping together. I know, I know, we weren’t camping. There were roofs and flush toilets, and for Jan and me, actual doors with doorknobs. But, you have to understand my idea of roughing it is black and white television. And as most here know it rained a great deal during this camp experience. Still, I have to admit, as reluctant as I am to do so, I had a lot of fun.

And, maybe just a little more than fun. Today, I would like to speak just briefly about the experience of our FUSN adventures on Sandy Island, and then at a little more length about what spiritual lessons there could be for us in this regular event we engage as a community.

For more years than most of us here are willing to count we’ve had these two all-church retreat events. Originally they were held at Ferry Beach, our denominationally owned campsite on the coast of Maine. Somewhere along the line other UUs began to notice how FUSN had locked up not one but two major three-day weekends. So perhaps it was inevitable that we would eventually be asked to give one of them up.

Fortunately we had an ace in the hole. That ace started with Arthur Lein who had been coming to Sandy Island ever since it was a men’s retreat, owned by the YMCA. When it became a family camp, though still owned by the Y, he and Helen and their kids started coming together. So, right now our longest continuing Sandy Island camper is Karen Lein, who has been attending for forty-four summers, if you count the year Helen came while pregnant with Karen.

Arthur started telling his friends about Sandy Island, and by the time we were getting the boot from Ferry Beach, the Holbeins, the Elertsons, the Hartmans and the Neumanns had all been visiting the island for years. Karen mentioned this might be a solution to our quest for a new site. And with her incredible energy, Lynn Holbein pretty much made it happen. After a little more than a decade, Memorial Day weekend, FUSN and Sandy Island have become joined terms.

Sandy Island and our sojourn at Ferry Beach are incredibly successful community activities. I can only hope our new small group ministry proves to be as successful in our continuing mission of exploring those twin profound human needs: intimacy and ultimacy.

Now, I know a number in this room think they’ve come here because of the kids. I suggest even if that truly is the presenting impetus, there are also those twin calls of intimacy and ultimacy, which very much are the work of religious societies. Within our depths we human beings feel a longing to know and be known. We need to find our connections. And that, I suggest, is really what pulls us again and again into this room, into this company.

We gather together on a spiritual quest to know how it is we really are constructed, and what it is that truly motivates our actions. We come together to heal our brokenness and to seek guidance for what it is we do. And our deep intuition is that we can come to know this out of our coming together intimately.

Our Sunday worship patterns, with the choir and our wonderful organist Joe, with those candles of joy and sorrow, with moments of friendship, and hopefully with the sermon, each are intended to help us in our quest for finding intimacy in its various forms, as well as ultimacy, a visceral knowing of the depths of our condition. Regular patterns help us in this quest. Such is the place of ritual. But, sometimes we also need to shake off the regular to find those precious experiences. These contradictions are part of the joyful conundrum of our human condition.

Anyway, with the rains and everything being rescheduled inside, I guarantee the intimacy part of our common quest was met while at Sandy Island. There is nothing like standing on line for a cup of coffee, when you can smell the rain and chill outside, to feel the warmth of human company. Our communal meals really spoke to me about how sweet human companionship can be. I also found myself understanding the ancient emphasis on sacred meals: the Jewish Friday family gathering, the Christian communion, etcetera, etcetera.

The ultimacy out of our camp experience is much like that experience of Dr Watson’s, witnessing the starry night. I admit I am a city boy. There probably is no part of any urban environment I can be dropped into that I don’t feel certain I can at least walk out of. But, put me in the countryside, and I don’t know if that cow is dangerous or not. Sure looks big. Still, there is, even in me, some deep longing to be away from the city, away from artifice, away from the mad dash of urban life.

We need to take some time to allow the tent to be stolen from us, our ideas that cover reality--and to just experience it. We need to contemplate the astrological or for me the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual. We need those opportunities to see through, to come to pure witness. I suggest much can be learned when we simply witness, without internal comment, something like that small child with painted face and waving feather, moving deliberately.

If our great concerns as a spiritual people really are with the issues of intimacy and ultimacy, I suggest once in a while taking a retreat from the regular, from what we are used to and come to feel comfortable with and begin to assume is actually the way things really are; is essential. Here in such special moments and places we are given an opportunity to deconstruct our notions of the real.

For example, in the joke awards there was one more that stuck out in my consciousness. It was first or second runner up, I forget. It spoke of the old man who had lived his whole life in a small cabin on the Maine and New Hampshire border. A survey had just been completed and he was informed that he actually did not live in Maine, but rather in New Hampshire. His response was, "Thank goodness! I don’t think I could endure another Maine winter."

The truth is almost everything we think of as genuine, as real, as concrete and sustained, is not. We dream the world into existence. Our minds, amazing things that they are, construct a world for each of us. These private worlds touch the real, no doubt, but they are frequently just a little too solid, just a little to forever, to actually reflect what is.

To put it in philosophical terms, Yale biophysicist Harold Morowitz, to my mind accurately if a little thickly described what is, through a reflection on an ecological consciousness, a broader and I believe more realistic vision than we usually hold.

"Viewed from the point of view of modern (ecology)," Morowitz wrote. "Each living thing is a dissipative structure, that is, it does not endure in and of itself but only as a result of the continual flow of energy in the system… From this point of view, the reality of individuals is problematic because they do not exist per se but only as local perturbations in this universal energy flow…

"An example might be instructive. Consider a vortex in a stream of flowing water. The vortex is a structure made of an ever-changing group of water molecules. It does not exist as an entity in the classical Western sense; it exists only because of the flow of water through the stream. If the flow ceases the vortex disappears. In the same sense the structures out of which… biological entities are made are transient, (and) unstable… with constantly changing molecules dependent on a constant flow of energy to maintain form and structure."

I suggest there is nothing like a walk in the woods to catch a glimpse of this philosophical statement as a visceral and physical reality. When we go out into the wilderness, that tent we’ve so carefully constructed can be and sometimes actually is stolen away. Then as we contemplate the starry night, we see ourselves, and our place.

As we do such things, as we allow ourselves such possibilities, we begin to intuit some of the hidden truths found in a sustained reflection on intimacy and ultimacy. If we allow ourselves to be open to it, a church camping trip really can reveal the mysteries of the cosmos. We just need to allow ourselves surprise. In the moment of surprise, of genuine openness we can taste it, we can hear it, we can smell it, we can touch it, we can see it. We find our nature: we are tentative, unique, and a part of it all.

There are so many consequences to our coming to know this as true. Some here are aware I spent a few years studying Sufi mysticism. One of my favorite teachers was Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was the first Sufi teacher in the west, arriving in California at the turn of the last century. I knew him through some of his still living students, and through his writings. And I consider him one of my true teachers.

He wrote how "Sarmad, a great Sufi saint… was asked by the emperor… (who had noticed his absence from worship services) to attend the mosque. …It was against the rules of the time that anyone keep away from the regular prayers...

"Sarmad, being a man of ecstasy, living every moment of his day and night in union with God, being God-conscious himself… refused. A certain time of prayer or a certain place for prayer to him was nothing. Every place to him was a place of prayer; every time was a time of prayer; his every breath was a prayer."

Here I suggest we come to where the quest for intimacy and ultimacy leads us, just like that painted child, waving her feather, marching diligently toward the older children. It is holy. Here we find something of our true nature. It is sacred.

Now Sandy Island is a refuge, a park, not the full range of the natural. But, it proves to be enough. The children playing bocce ball or canoeing, or just running down the trails. The parents putting together a bridge game, a book discussion group, or walking hand in hand along the shore. It is, very much, a safe place. But, there is just enough of the wild, to allow us to experience, if we are willing, that profound truth the world is rarely as we think it is.

Particularly I felt the children, faces painted, feathers found, hand woven beaded necklaces around their necks, running along those trails; were truly my teachers. They knew how to engage this reality, this temporary and yet eternal thing. They played. They danced. They sang. And they showed us, the slower, tubbier, more ponderous adults, that we too, can live lightly on this planet.

Another of my heroes is the naturalist and poet Gary Snyder. Somewhere he writes from this perspective of connection, and transformation, which lies at the heart of our Sandy Island experience. I think it a good summary for today. "Ultimately," Snyder tells us. "We can all lay claim to the term native and the songs and dances, the beads and feathers, and the profound responsibilities that go with it. We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit."

Isn’t that a glorious calling?

And it really is ours, yours and mine: a call to come home.

Amen.