THE SACRED JOURNEY A Passover Reflection
James Ishmael Ford
9 April 2006

Text
They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
Brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

Lynn Ungar

Back when I was in seminary, in the very late 1980s, a time quickly receding into the mists I’m noticing with some dismay, I recall a conversation with a number of other mildly over-the-hill graduate students. We were all second or third career types, mostly working while going to school, and for the most part not taken up with things like student government, or for that matter anything that interfered with study or paying the rent.

Still, we were students, and there’s something about that magical time, even for a returning student, when the world is a series of questions, everything is wondrous, and one can completely without irony make grand assertions about what is and is not. All so lovely; and I think, important.

Anyway, there we were. Four friends, a bit tired, brains crammed with knowledge to overflowing, most of us with a glass of wine in hand; when one among our number declared, “You know, I’m a twenty-first century kind of woman.” We responded with silence. But even though the turn of the century was still a bit more than a decade away, we knew what she meant: Forward looking, optimistic, pragmatic, not bound by the chains of the past. Finally, another among us said, “Me, too. I’m a twenty-first century kind of guy.” A little more silence. Then our third companion joined in, “Yes, me, as well. I’m a twenty-first century kind of person.” A bit more silence. And then, before I could say anything, one of my friends offered, “You know, we’re all twenty-first century kind of people. Except for you, James.” They looked at me. “You’re definitely,” she said, “Fourteenth century.”

Thirteenth, I thought; after all that’s the era of Thomas Aquinas and his spiritual contemporary the Japanese Zen philosopher Eihei Dogen. But on the bigger point they did have me. My deal has always been a tad counter culture, definitely not in the mainstream of modern American concern. My angst at sixteen was to know if God existed. I even prayed with as much passion as I could muster, and a sixteen year old has a lot of passion; that if it could be revealed to me God did exist, I’d be happy to die in the next moment. And so, perhaps it was simply a logical consequence that a few years later in those raging late Nineteen Sixties I entered a Buddhist monastery. When smarter people were getting degrees and thinking careers, my obsessions were of the spiritual quest. And over the many years this has continued to be true for me.

Frankly, I feel that we who’ve found ourselves in spiritual communities like this one here, have also been touched by those concerns. We ask about meaning and direction, we wonder about what is holy and how to make lives worth living. Perhaps this quest has been embarked upon in not so crazy a way as it has been for me. Still, it is a burning coal for just about all of us. I’m pretty sure. But whether burning, or simply smoldering, the concerns of spirituality, of a larger life, is a hot part for most who walk into this building and take a seat in one of our pews. This spiritual journey is important, and it is what we’re about here.

There are a number of applicable metaphors for this journey. Towards home. Towards awakening. One of the most powerful is the journey towards freedom. Here we get that most powerful story, the story of Exodus. Elie Weisel famously and rhetorically asked “What significance does Passover have, if not to keep our memories alive?” Memory is the great gift of our human condition. At the same time many of the rabbis point out the Seder celebration is a call to more than memory, as precious as that may be. It is an invitation to move from a memory to a living experience of our passage from bondage (in Egypt, which in Hebrew is Mitzrayim, the narrow or constricted place) to freedom, not in some fabled past, but here and today. It also provides a bit of a map. It tells something of the journey and how we might best undertake it.

As I’ve thought about Passover I also notice a bit of a back story. First is how we all owe so much to others. The Seder ritual at the heart of the Passover observance appears to be modeled on the ancient Greek Symposium. The Symposium, a structured conversation, sometimes little more than a drinking party, is also sometimes an opportunity for a deep and structured conversation, which we can read about today in Plato’s dialog of the same name. It’s occurred to me there are deep similarities between the Symposium as a spiritual discourse, the Seder as a spiritual discourse and our own Small Group ministry program. But, while a pointer, also a digression.

Within the Seder ritual I notice a pointer to four steps on the spiritual path. There can be more. And even here, there is a do it, and then repeat it quality. First is a dedication. This is where we set an intention. It occurs when we notice what’s going on. It also involves both an intention to move away and to move toward. What we intend to move away from in this story is captivity. Literally, as we know from the Hebrew word for Egypt, is a move away from narrowness. Therefore the positive intention is to move beyond our narrowness, what I think of as our ego-driven desire-oriented lives, toward holiness, toward the whole, toward expansion and generosity, curiosity and engagement.

The second thing in the Seder is a ritual washing. Such an ancient ritual. Here our intention is given its first concrete expression. We wash, we clean up, we tidy up the messes we’ve made out of that sense of narrowness, of separation, of constriction. It’s easy to see how this should be so. When you want to cook, the first thing is to clean up. In AA one of the first steps is to atone for the wrong’s one has committed.

Third, we take nourishment, but of the humblest sort, some vegetables. Here our profoundest needs are represented in hunger. We all must eat. And we should never forget our bodies, our selves, our relationships with others. In this Passover ritual the satisfaction of our hunger is found easily, in the simplest thing; that is if we’re willing to notice.

Fourth, and last, is a breaking. Often this is the hardest thing to accept when we embark on a spiritual journey. We tend to want it easy. We tend not to want to hurt. So, a symbolic hint. In the Seder ritual this breaking is of the matzoth, the bread. In reality, however, it’s about our own breaking, the need for us to surrender being right or, for some of us, of being wrong. We need to not believe everything we think. We need to open ourselves to curiosity, to engagement, to not turning away. We need to let go, we need to allow the world in all its terribly glory to do what it must with us.

Within this last part there is the sharing of stories. I really believe we are the symbol bearing animal. Our minds, our worlds, our hopes all are woven out of stories. There are many good and true stories; that of Jesus, that of the Buddha, to name two. Here we have the story of Exodus. Here we’re given the big picture, the long view, the wide perspective of genuine wisdom.

At Passover, out of this telling of stories, come the questions. In the Seder all our questions are reduced to four. If you’re interested and don’t know what the specific questions are here, I suggest later you google “four” “questions” and “Seder.” You’ll learn some interesting things. But broadly the questions mark out the Passover event. And it turns out they’re less questions than a single woven together statement in four parts. We’re in a rush to get away and toward; slavery of any sort is as bitter as bitter can be; we’re moving from that bitter to the sweet; and thanks to our taking this journey, this sacred journey, today we can live in freedom.

Well, that’s my thought on the spiritual journey for today. What do you notice in this story? What should we hold up for consideration at this special time we’ve marked out to be together?

Congregational Reflections

In conclusion another poem from Lynn Ungar

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, borei p’ri hagafen.

Wine, like memory, full in the cup
What do you taste in the glass
I have poured you?
Years ago I went picking
grapes – did I ever tell you?
One hot September Sunday
my friends and I staged
bacchanalian revels among
the dust and bees and heavy vines
Watched the juice of our
labors running off the wooden press
Some days I feel that liquid
Running slowly through my veins
Unfiltered and impure; still
carrying its sediment of dust
and stems and old sunlight.

I have been storing up
these memories for you –
racked and turned and tasted them
Grape picking and the afternoons
Spent foraging for berries
Along the tracks, up to our
elbows in berry juice and scratches
I know I have mixed
the earth’s blood with my own
Can you taste the blood
and berries? You are holding
my history against your tongue

I want to drink with you
From the common cup
May memory gather
the fruits of all seasons
May our stories all linger
like wine on the tongue

Praised be Thou, Eternal God creator of the fruit of the vine