“A Spiritual View of the Season: Finding Our True North.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: I remember author and psychologist Wayne Dyer describing a period in his life when he was very much out of touch with himself. It was most evident in his driving to his office in San Francisco. The traffic was simply driving him nuts. A two-car crash would not only tie up traffic for extended periods, but it also would send him into orbit. By the time he arrived at work, he was spewing venom. His staff would try to overlook it by saying one to another, “The traffic….”

It also was not unusual for him to come home in a rage from the work traffic he had encountered. His wife was used to saying to the children, “The traffic….” Dyer surmised that when he died, they would probably write on his tombstone, “The traffic....”

Then one day as he sat in his automobile angrily honking at the traffic ahead of him for coming to a complete halt on the freeway, he happened to look at the guy in the lane to his left. That driver had pulled out a newspaper and was reading away, and paying no attention to his honking. Dyer looked to the right lane, and saw a woman who had her stereo audio turned up, and was pounding her hands in rhythm to the music, oblivious to him and his plight.

Dyer then looked all around him, and they had the same disdain. It suddenly hit him: The traffic didn’t care!  That was a significant spiritual learning moment for Dyer. He immediately took outer steps to get control of his inner life, rather than living it in angry reaction to the daily dilemma of maneuvering through traffic.

TRANSITION

The French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, has an interesting take on this issue. He says that while it’s true that we all have an innate instinct towards reflective living, it is even more true that in the ordinary ongoingness of our lives, like driving to the office in San Francisco, we lose touch with that divine dimension.

The reality is that our Western way of living does not truly encourage the reflective life. American society does not affirm our taking time to address important questions in our lives each day. Do you know of any company that says to its employees, “Hey, when you clock in next time, go take 30 minutes on company time to go to the chapel or meditation room so as to get in touch with yourself? And if you are having trouble finding your center, take time off to go see your spiritual director. Because we know that we will have a better, more productive, and happier employee if you take care of your inner life, if you keep in touch with reality at a deeper level, if you stay close to your divine self.”

The answer of course is, no: There is no such company. Bachelard says, that’s true of all of Western society.

Which means that, the living of life itself gets in the way of our getting in touch with our true selves…our spiritual selves…and of our finding our true north. So what can we do about it?

SPIRITUAL SCRIPTURE.

With all the justifiable uproar over the refusal of China to allow its first Nobel Peace Prize winner to accept the prize or to attend the awards ceremony in Oslo, Norway, it seemed appropriate to listen to the words of another Nobel Laureate, this one in literature – Rabindranath Tagore also, the first from India. His was awarded in 1913 – almost 100 years ago. While reading through some of his work, I found this summation of his work in a footnote:

1. “Spiritual values are obtained by cultivating inward honesty.”

That’s why the loss of prayer for liberal religious is so huge, no matter to whom or to what we directed it. The reason? Because in private personal prayer, it’s almost impossible to lie to ourselves. Martin Luther, the 16^th century German monk who was the catalyst for what we know as the Protestant Reformation, said it best, “We pray, my sisters and brothers, not to inform God, but to inform ourselves.” The formation and articulation of a private personal prayer puts into words what it is that we are about in our living. The truth is that we are intensely honest in private personal prayer. So not only are spiritual values obtained by inner honesty, they are enabled by private personal prayer.

2. There is a futility in mere negation or renunciation…to keep repeating what we don’t believe, instead of what we do believe. I know I’m hard on atheists sometimes, especially when our atheism is referring to the mythological world view stemming from the bible. We’re long past struggling with that. Of course, God didn’t create the Earth in six days or sixteen. The whale didn’t swallow Jonah and belch him up. Jesus didn’t die dead and three days later come back to life. Nor is he returning again to this world or any other. Saying we don’t believe any of that is purely negation…nothing to hold on to in times of stress and need.

Spiritually speaking, we have to move on to the hard stuff, such as, what do we do in a world in which we can’t find the directions…life’s recipe has too many elements…and things are going to hell in a hand-basket in breathtakingly fast ways.

For example: I think most of us have been shocked by the story of the 14 year old who shot his parents in the not so far away Golden Gates Estate in Naples. It reinforces my absolute detestation for the National Rifle Association and how terribly effective they have been in distorting the U.S. Constitution and creating an avalanche of new laws encouraging totally unnecessary weapons in every sphere of society. One of their mantras has been, “When citizens no longer can carry guns, only criminals will have them.” That’s not true. It’s when we make dumb and stupid laws like we now have, and a reactionary U.S. Supreme Court approves them, so that now not only do criminals have access to guns, but so do 14 year olds. The NRA ought also to be on trial in this tragic, tragic death.

I read the report of the initial hearing and that the 5’5”, 100 pound 14 year old, was crying uncontrollably. He needed his mother or father. He’s just a 14 year old kid, for crying out loud. But there would be no mother or father to console him because of the lunacy of a family with children having guns in the house, which one of the children used to shoot his own parents. Imagine the conflict of the extended family and friends, who are devastated by the loss of the young parents, but who also love and are concerned for the boy who took their lives.

In times like these, we recognize how much more faith has to be than merely what we don’t believe. We need spiritual hand holds to hang on to.

3. We have a need for a holistic or whole development of life. We are not a brain on two toothpicks, but a body, mind, and spirit. We need to treat our body as the unique and wonderful creation it is. That means feed it right, rest it right, and exercise it. We need to keep our minds informed and active. We need also to develop our spiritual wellbeing, to work towards finding our true north

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Finally, Tagore states the imperative of having:

4. A positive attitude of empathy for all, even the lowly and the lost.

Think about it for a moment:

1. What about our fellow Americans of same-sex orientation who learned this past week that Republicans successfully filibustered the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the military in relationship to lesbians and gays, closing the door most probably until one day the courts have to step in and correct this moral wrong? What kind of government will let young men give their lives for it, but will not permit those same young men disclosing a sexual orientation they were born with…to be who they were born to be?
2. What about the people getting out of prison, who in today’s economy will have absolutely no options in finding a job or supporting their family? I’ve had some heartbreaking telephone calls e-mails and telephone calls. While the rich get richer through even bigger tax breaks, the poor don’t have to worry – too many of them don’t have income on which to pay taxes to begin with.
3. What about the young Black men to whom our society has constructed systemic walls of prejudice and low expectations that mean at least one-third of them will go through some phase of the criminal justice system?
4. What about the homeless, the hungry, those in prison, those who are sick and in the hospital?

Tagore says if we have any spiritual awareness in us at all, we will be concerned about all of these. So how do we develop that kind of spirituality? It’s a question I’ve sought the answer to for many years. The answer comes in bits and pieces, not in sudden flashes or brilliant insights.

APPLICATION.

Some years back, for a significant period of time, I went on a weekly retreat at St. Francis in the Woods in Coyle, Oklahoma, an interfaith retreat center, started by an Orthodox Catholic bishop. I would drive to the center by noon on Monday and leave at the same time on Wednesday.

I had one enlightening experience that I’ve never forgotten. I was staying in a very isolated cabin and hadn’t been there too many hours, when I stepped out on the front porch of my cabin. As I did so, I thought to myself that I should leave the door open so that I could hear the phone if it rang. Then I realized: There was no phones…no television…no radio. Nothing to distract from tuning in to oneself.

            So I continued out on to the porch and sat down in a rocker. There was an afternoon thunderstorm concluding…the sun was breaking through the clouds…the leaves on the trees were wet…and off in the distance I saw a bolt of lightening. I counted: “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5, and 6 and 7” when the sound waves of the thunder rolled in. I looked at the giant oak tree some distance away. The sun was shining on the tree leaves, causing them to glisten like silver. A squirrel started down the trunk of the tree, venturing from its safety. He turned to look at me, making an evaluation as to whether it would be safe to run to the next tree. Suddenly, he jumped to the ground and ran quickly to the next tree, turning ever so briefly to look at me as if to say, “See. You can’t catch me.”

I continued sitting and watching as the afternoon sun began slowly to sink in the Western sky. It was quiet. It was solitary. I was all alone.

            And I began to listen to the rhythms of my body…to feel my pulse…to hear the harmonies of my heart…and to catch the echo of my soul in resonance with the wonder of the Universe. The rain, the sun, the wind, the grass, the trees, and I was there…fully there. My heartbeat slowed down. My pulse beat slower. And I relaxed in the arms of the Cosmos. At ease. At peace. Which is what finding our true north is all about.

CONCLUSION.

I don’t know how many of you saw the beautiful film some years back entitled, “The Postman.” It’s a wonderful cinematic experience about a for real poet and one of his very simple admirers. In the movie, the poet explains to his admirer that poetry is about metaphors. His admirer asks, “What’s a metaphor?” The poet gives an example: “The ship plowed through the sea.” That used the imagery of a farm plow breaking up the ground to compare to a ship rushing through the waters and laying aside the waters just like a plow does the dirt of the earth. The point’s being that he was using one set of images in one field or arena to describe another field or arena.

            It seems to me that we can do that with the metaphor of Christmas, just as well. What hinders us sometimes is that we slip into fundamentalist thinking…insisting that it did or did not happen.

            To my way of thinking that misses the whole point. What we in fact have is a marvelous, primitive story from almost 2,000 years ago, which children and adults love, attempting to describe how humans are connected to the encompassing mystery of existence, how they interface with the reality that is greater than we or me.

Now we can ask the rather absurd question, “Did a divine being really come down and have intercourse with a young virgin in the little postage stamp size country of Israel, in the little town of Bethlehem 2,000 years ago?” Of course not. We know that’s a mytho-poetic accounting of the birth of Jesus. No one really knows where he was born. But that’s not the point. It’s the story. It’s the metaphor. It’s the ship plowing through the ocean. It’s our human way of telling stories in metaphorical form to illustrate a deeper point.

So, it’s our task on this Sunday morning to hear what’s the comparison of the metaphor, not to search for black and white, two plus two equal four. We’re to search for it in the beautiful music Nancy is singing for us and in the carols we sing, and in the poetry of scripture which millions around the world will hear this Christmas, and with which I close:

“Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will, towards men. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And you shall find him wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.”

The point is that sometimes life’s stories are told in the most beautiful of metaphors with things like angels and shepherds and wise men. They tell us that divinity isn’t up there, or out there, but it’s some times in the strangest of places; it’s in the birth of babies, even of poor babies, born in cattle stalls…Sometimes it’s even in you and you and even me.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And Blessed Be.