WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE Exploring Spiritual Dislocation
5 February 2006
Anne Bancroft & James Ishmael Ford

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“I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”
Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz

Anne
Good morning – It’s lovely to be back. I want to thank most particularly Chris and Wendy, but all of you, really, for managing our Religious Education program so gracefully while I was away. I had a busy, full, demanding and fascinating semester – and mostly what I can say is that I’m lucky to have such a forgiving family. I was not always at my best form – hard as that is to imagine! And they (and by they, I mean Dan and Lilly – because the other two are off in the big world and actually, I really mean Dan since Lilly didn’t want to listen to me) – well, so Dan was very patient helping me work through a lot of the details of my class content. He never failed to look truly interested when I was struggling with confusing topics.

Most recently I was sharing more imminent matters, like the topic of today’s sermon. And in true clarifying fashion, when I mentioned that James and I were going to be talking about what happens when you discover you’re not in Kansas anymore, he sort of rolled his eyes and said, “You know, Anne. Massachusetts has never really been a part of Kansas.”

OK, but that’s not what I meant! You see, school had a way of turning things upside down for me – not just how I spent my time, although that was a big change – and not just the constant intake, intake, intake as opposed to my more typical in and out – but really challenging me to question some very basic assumptions – the kind of rocks on which we build our lives’ foundations. As an aside, it is not surprising to learn that many marriages do not survive the rigors of one partner experiencing divinity school! Questions abound, like: What is good? Does evil exist independent of human behavior? What is guilt based on? Who, or what, is God? And, what do we owe to each other more than to ourselves, if anything?

Now, one can’t work in a faith environment and not be faced with questions like these all the time, but the density of the experience had me feeling, as much as thinking, that I was simply not in Kansas anymore. No more comforting Auntie Em, no more predictable, reliable answers safely cushioning my falls. No more tidy house of relative certainty, or pleasant vision to the horizon’s edge.

And I realized as well that while, for me – this time at least - it was school that was rattling my reality, for others it might be different kinds of trauma: a new phase in life; a relocation; a job change; illness or loss, death, or perhaps simply a sudden loss of hope. These are not the little shifts, the tweaks that life throws us, but the big picture issues. Inevitably we are challenged by changes that draw us up short, pushing new questions and new and uninvited if not unwelcome doubts into our status quos, such that we realize we’re on totally unfamiliar ground, for some of us the first time, for some of us, again.

I found myself trying hard to exhale, to avoid a sort of panic, and to determine what to do with my new uncertainty. And thus our question – what happens when we realize we’re not in Kansas anymore.

James
I really understand that sense of dislocation, that sense I really am not in Kansas anymore. I'm sure we've all experienced it. So, what do we do when our world is shaken? How do we react when we are confronted with the great dislocations of life? What can we do when the rock upon which we've stood for so long turns to sand, when a marriage doesn't survive, a long time job is lost, or we're wracked by illness, loss, or death?

A few years ago I was driving across Pennsylvania, the long way. For an East Coast state, it's pretty big. It was night and I still had miles to cover before I could stop. I think it was about eight in the evening when I pushed the automatic search on the car radio and it circled for what seemed ages before finally hitting a Country and Western station. I pushed the button again; it circled around for more ages and then hit another Country and Western station. Flipping between those two stations for the next couple of hours it turned out the favorite song that night that week that year was something by Pam Tillis. While about a different bit of geography than Kansas , it suggests one favorite human way of dealing with our world crumbling around us.

"Well I said he had a lot of potential/He was only misunderstood/You know he didn't really mean to treat me so bad/He wanted to be good/And I swore one day I would tame him/Even though he loved to run hog wild/Just call me Cleopatra everybody, 'cause I'm the Queen of Denial"

I understand this song. I doubt anyone in this hall doesn't understand this song. Denial is one of the great human survival mechanisms. In fact I sometimes think it is underrated for that very fact: denial can get is through some rough patches. But, denial made big, denial made a significant part of our lives, well that's another story. Then we saddle ourselves with lugs like Pam Tillis's character has.

Or, worse; it can be much worse. The fundamentalist phenomenon in religion is the institutionalizing of denial. It is a rejection of modernity, of how the world confronts us, of how the world is – in favor of a neat and tidy vision. We can see in a consideration of fundamentalist religions around the world what hurt and suffering follows such an embrace. In order to hold on to a vision of the world that has been shaken, that old Kansas, as the only true Kansas, takes us to that river which has drowned too many people. It's a common enough choice. It's also an ugly thing, leading only to hurt and suppression. You have to go to a great deal of effort to defend a Kansas that has vanished.

"Well I'm not gonna jump to conclusions/Or throw away this perfect romance/Even though I caught him dancin' last night/With a girl in a leopard skin pants/Yeah, he's probably stuck in traffic/And he'll be here in a little while/Just call me Cleopatra/everybody, 'cause I'm the Queen of Denial//Oh Queen of Denial, buyin' all his alibis/Queen of Denial, just floatin' down a river of lies."

Anne
I get such a kick out of the fact that James is referencing Country Western music. Of course, he had to be stuck in a car, late at night in the middle of Pennsylvania to learn to appreciate it, but – all things in good time, I suppose. Soon he’ll be pumping it into Monday night zen sitting!

It’s likely that at some point – and perhaps we should say hopefully at some point - denial stops working, though clearly on the meta-level, the fundamentalist movement level, it requires a great deal more time. But individually, that clinging to the old in the face of the new gets exhaustive. Fingers loosen their cramped grasp and we fall suddenly to a new place. We make the choice to trade the sight of roses in the garden for the majesty of the stag’s visit – a decided and intentional shift in priorities. For others it may be a gradual recognition that indeed their efforts at holding on to an old model, an old image of how life is supposed to be or how they thought it was supposed to be, is taking more effort than they can bear any longer. Either way, our patterns – our expectations - are curiously comfortable, and not easily released, so it’s not hard to imagine that when we lose one construct, finally able to acknowledge its inadequacy, we replace it with another. Following the theological thread: if, for example, a certain perspective on God was implicit in your first Kansas, and something happened to convince you that in fact that perspective was mistaken, you might land in a new Kansas with a revised version of theology of which you are equally certain, or perhaps you land in a Kansas with no theology at all, but the certainty still.

It is our human default to create those places, the compass points we use to direct our actions. And for the most part, it’s not the Kansas-making that’s the problem. If and when the time comes that we realize we’re not in the Kansas we had long relied on, well – we have to be somewhere! It would be profoundly disconcerting to live an endless not-Kansas-but-nowhere-else-either. It would be more than disconcerting, in fact. We would be lost, as indeed, sometimes, we are.

We need to be prepared to create new ground for ourselves to stand on when we are confronted with change. The trick is, it seems, that we must also be prepared for the possibility of that ground being challenged as well.

James
In fact we can rest assured whatever new Kansas appears, it will in time also be shaken, challenged, perhaps destroyed. This is the deal with our human minds. They are magnificent things. We were designed to find patterns within the mass of information our senses bring to our brains. This is how we survive and why as a species we've flourished, perhaps even too successfully. But that's for another sermon. This ability to find patterns has its shadow. The biggest one is if we don't find a pattern, we are inclined to manufacture one. Or, more commonly, we weave things we've really found together with little stories that patch the holes and tidies it all up.

This means whatever Kansas we find ourselves living in, the happy family, the successful career, the healthy lifestyle: it isn't stable. Our idea of what is is only ever partially true. And, even the true stuff, say we got married and made a commitment to one another for a whole lifetime; well somewhere along the line what was true once may no longer be true. Things change, we change. So, here we are living in our various Kansas's, partially accurate reflections of the world-as-it-is, partially not; and all of it subject to sudden shifts. Tornadoes whirl along, sweep us up, and plop us down somewhere new.

One of the most interesting books I read in seminary was by a PSR, that's my seminary the Pacific School of Religion professor Robert McAfee Brown. The title was Creative Dislocation – the Movement of Grace. Brown observed "dislocation, with all its risks, is surely preferable to stagnation, which is the temptation when we cling too powerfully to what we have. When we do that, growth ceases." Brown then pointed out the alternative, being open, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, while it has its own dangers, is also to open ourselves to the movement of grace. Grace is a lovely word. Derives from the Latin meaning "pleasing" and suggests effortless beauty, refinement, goodwill. No wonder it's a central theological principle in several religions. It's the good thing that happens when we open ourselves up, when we stop clinging to the old Kansas, tightly, with a death-grip; and instead live fully in Kansas knowing, knowing in our bodies, another tornado is on its way.

We encourage this openness in a hundred different ways. One of them is to come into a religious community like ours. You know if you come here, somewhere along the line, if you ever open your mouth at all, what you say will be questioned. We live with a hundred little tornadoes here. And if we engage the questions with the joy they deserve, we find our Kansas is shifting constantly, ever more realistic, ever more fluid, ever more joyful.

Anne
I was particularly saddened to hear that Wendy Wasserstein died last week. We have lost an insightful writer whose plays displayed the complex irony and humor of situational life. One of the articles I read said, “The popularity of her work speaks for her ability to salve a little of that feeling of aloneness in her audiences with her deeply felt portraits of women — and occasionally men — seeking solidarity in their individuality, finding comfort in the knowledge that everybody else is sometimes uncomfortable with the choices they've made, too.”

Living a life open to change such as James suggested, living vulnerably, is one of those choices. It’s an intellectual and an emotional choice, and it can makes you feel exposed and at risk. To choose to live awake is to see everything that is good but also everything that is threatening – every possible destructive tornado – and it can be really difficult, even paralyzing. How can we stay safe, and keep those we love safe, if all we see is the potential for ruin.

An e-mail that crossed my desk recently ended with the following: “For I am a prisoner of the dark still, filled with the inevitable hubris of despair.” Oh, my heart hurt for that moment of hopelessness, for that inclination to fear. And I wanted to remind the writer, even though I know he knows, that despair is not the only companion of the open road, though it is a seductive one. Hope is as much at the mercy of what we cannot know as despair. Hope requires as much hubris, and at least as much energy. And hope, like grace, is all about our ability to love.

Feed my soul. Feed my soul. Fill my heart, and Feed my soul. In learning we awaken to the realization that Kansas – that stable, solid, warm, nurturing, familiar Kansas - is a place in our hearts – a destination that we are challenged to choose, over and over again. When we’re rocked, if we can choose love, with all its openness and inherent risks - grace happens, and we return home.

Know now that love is open to those who choose its path. And come home.

It’s awfully nice to be here.

Amen.