The Endless Journey

Given by James Covington on June 11th, 2006

“This part of the journey is new to me, Jim. Never been here before.” And then he chuckled a bit. I had just greeted my friend Dan, as he lay in his bed, dying. “Yeah, I hear you, my friend. Anything you want to say about it?’

“Not yet,” he said, “but I will, maybe in poem I am thinking about writing on nature-hood. You got anything to say about it?”

Hmmmm. Dan was always good at asking questions, or throwing them back. We’ve known each other for 30 years. We have also been in a men’s group for most of those years, but whether we are in our men’s group or having lunch, we have often “probed the depths,” as we like to say.

Hmmm. Finally, I said, “Well, I guess I wish it didn’t have to be like this, to be honest.” “Yeah, me too,” he whispered.

Then I just started rambling about the journey of life, and how it never ends; that death is just another venture to what else I don’t know, but can’t help but hope and believe that his spirit will be transformed into something new, unknown, hidden, but something, just behind the bubble of the universe as we know it and that one thing for sure is that he will live forever in the hearts of all of us who know him and love him; that what we all have with him and from him can’t ever end!

“Thank you, Jim! That’s reassuring.” he said, as he drifted into sleep.

Somewhat surprised that I had said anything that could be reassuring in a moment like this, I starting singing “Amazing Grace,” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” old tunes we used to sing in the car when riding out together to the beach on summer days. Dan died last Friday morning.

There is so much I could talk about this morning: genocide, global warming, poverty, terrorism, immigration, the death of a truly brutal terrorist, our nation’s moral responsibility to the Iraqi people.

But I choose not to go there today, not because these issues are unimportant. No, I choose to be where I am—a bit tired at the moment of media commentary and political posturing, I admit. So I choose to stay with the grieving part of life’s journey, when I am reminded anew that life is loss. For all we gain we also lose –a friend, a day, a chance, finally life itself. To oppose the pain of loss, we reach out to one another. The force of love creates our many different connections. As I talked about last Sunday, connections nurture the soul. The religious impulse is to connect. Surely this is one of the reasons we are here today. To connect with one another, to connect with the sacred–that which is greater than all but present in each– to nurture the soul. There are many ways to nurture the soul. One way is through grief. Ironically it is through grief that we often find life worth living once more.

For me, life’s greatest consternation is our disconnectedness. In spite of our need for connection, human beings keep disconnecting—either through busyness or the way we talk contemptuously to one another or don’t talk to one another at all, or in the quest for power to quell our fear of meaninglessness and death. Of course, now I speak philosophically. It’s high sounding, perhaps, but means little to those who seek to demean or annihilate others.

But I am not going to go there today. I have a greater need to nurture the soul—to ground my being in the sacred mystery, to feel connected to that which is greater than all, yet present in each. To feel connected to something greater than myself. How shall I do that with you now?

Well, it’s almost summertime, so let’s start on the beach. We are sitting on the sand (lathered with sunscreen, of course), looking out over the water, breathing the salt air, basking in the sun. Earth, water, air, fire, life in a cross-point, the four elements touching where the water meets the sand, the air and the sun. The four elements and us.

The water has no worries. Neither does the sun or the sand or the cool early summer breeze. It is we, with our strange mixture of matter and vapors, it is we who care and worry and sometimes even think to ask, “Where did “we” come from? Who are we? Where are we going?”

These are religious questions—seeking connection. See what I mean? Religion is our human response to the dual mystery of being alive and having to die.

The seagull doesn’t question. Neither does the crab hanging on for dear death from the gull’s beak. It is we, at the cross point of the four elements, who watch this drama and wonder about ourselves. Let’s start with what we do know. We are on the beach. That is where we are.

There was a book out a few years ago called “Powers of Ten.” It opens with a picture of person sitting on a beach. In a series of pictures, changing the frame by powers of ten, in one direction we move first from the body to the hand to the knuckle to a cluster of hairs, all the way down, to cell, atom, and electron. In the other direction we move from the body, to a group of people, to the entire beach, and from there to an expanse of shoreline, a state, half a continent, the globe, on to the solar system, the milky way, the universe.

So this is where we are, poised—equi-poised—on the angle of repose—on the cusp between the infinitesimal and infinitude.

By size, we are as many times greater than the smallest of creation’s constituent parts as we are smaller than the entire creation itself.

Both facts are staggering. For instance, the sun is one of a billion stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of at least a billion galaxies. Think about it. There are as many stars in the heavens as there are grains of sand on Fire Island. And ours is a peripheral star. If the cosmos were Fire Island, the earth would be a speck of dust on one grain of sand. And on that speck of dust, looking out upon the water, the air, the fire, the earth, would be us, sitting on a beach,–as many times larger than our most sub-microscopic part as the universe is larger than us—sitting on a beach wondering what it means to be alive and then to die.

And that’s the easy part, the where part. Who and why, whence and whither, are far more complicated. According to many religions, our primary goal in life is to answer these questions correctly before we die. It’s double jeopardy. Choose the right key, and the car we win will drive us straight to heaven, or Nirvana, or wherever it is that those of us who cross the right finish line within our allotted span of years are entitled to go. But if the key is wrong, if the engine doesn’t turn over, we lose everything: the curtain falls, the car implodes, and we are sent to outer darkness—to oblivion or hell, or, if you believe in reincarnation, back to earth perhaps, as an insect on the beach, several powers of ten smaller than before.

In this congregation, we know as little about these things as everyone else does. What is distinctive about us, is that we humbly admit it. I like to think our theology is based on two principles: humility and openness. Looked at in terms of powers of ten, the humility principle reminds us of our smallness, reminds us that no matter what we learn about life and death and God and ourselves at the end of our lives we will still know next to nothing. The openness principle is the opposite. It teaches that there is no limit to how much we can learn and change and grow.

Even as we are as much larger than infinitesimal as we are smaller than infinitude, we are also just as able to find meaning in life as we are unable to discover the meaning of life. Most religions turn that inside out. For them, meaning apart from THE meaning is fool’s gold, pure vanity, a sham. There is one path to heaven. The way is narrow. The gate opens to only one key.

Still, there is a problem. The problem with most religions is not that it is too otherworldly. The problem is that people apply the same logic a stockbroker uses on his or her portfolio to wager on the cosmos. Some even take the luck out, and treat it like a straight algebraic equation. Most religion is not too irrational, it is too rational. We use our minds to figure out things that can’t be figured out by anything as small as our minds. We try to make life check, but life doesn’t check. So we create dogmas and creeds to rationalize our faith—understandably a welcome invitation for the critical commentary of any cynic. And then, of course, there’s the other option: to be a cynic. Still, it doesn’t matter. Add up everything we have done in life backwards, and we won’t even begin to discover why we are where we are.

It’s not that I subscribe to the irrational as an antidote for knowledge gained from honest experience. I simply don’t trust our rational minds, whether informed by the Bible or even science, or The New York Times to begin to resolve the mystery and miracle of our being, being on the beach, looking out at the cross point of the four elements, wondering who and why we are.

What I do trust—and every religion is grounded in it—is the trans-rational, or in simple terms, the source for our sense of awe. It is amazing, absolutely amazing that you and I are here together this morning. We are each in different places in our own journeys. Some of us are in great pain. Others more or less content. Others feeling almost nothing. But that we can feel anything, that we can care and hope and fail and recover and, that we can love well, even though love is so hard, that we can take little parts of ourselves and parcel them out to others, that we can touch and speak and hear, even that we are alive enough to move, is so much more of a miracle than the parting of the Red Sea or the stopping of the Sun, that the likes of those miracles should be dropped forever into the religious ashcan.

Think about it this way. Forget for a moment about the billions of billions of stars, and forget about your bank account or the problems you are having at home. Just think about this: For you to be here this morning, more than a billion times a billion accidents took place.

Let me make it simple. All of our ancestors lived to puberty and coupled and gave birth. Not just our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Take it back to the beginning. Beyond the first Homo-Sapiens. Back to the urparamecium. To be the result of the one in a million sperm that made it to the egg is nothing when you think about everything that has happened from the creation until today to make it possible for us to be here.

So how do we respond? Far too often with, what did I do to deserve “this?”

Well, let me tell you something. We did nothing to deserve this. Against all the odds in the world, we were given something that we didn’t deserve at all. We were given life. We were given life and minds and bodies. Love and pain and failure and death.

So what does it all mean? One thing, one astounding, unbelievable thing it means, is that we have been in utero from the beginning of the creation. We can trace ourselves back, genetically, to the very beginning of time. The Universe was pregnant with us when it was born.

Think about it. Think about what a luxury it is to wonder what will happen to us after we die, even what will happen to us before we die. Having spent billions of years in gestation, present in all that preceded us, even admitting all the pain and difficulty involved in being actually alive, being able to feel and suffer and grieve and die, I can think of only one proper religious response. It has two parts. One is awe. The other, gratitude.

How does this effect how we treat others? How does this combination of Awe and gratitude, both based in the principles of humility and openness, effect how we treat others?

I hope that it means we will treat others as being as unpredictable, unexpected, complex, and amazing as ourselves. They too were in the womb of the universe when God first gave birth. They too have run a billion, billion gauntlets only to emerge against more than almost impossible odds here on this planet. They are more than neighbors. They are kin. See, there it is again: we are connected.

This is where religion does its best(and its worst) work. Not in the creation chapter or the Armageddon chapter, but in the middle of the story when all the actors are thrown together and none of us know as much as we think we do, and we are told. “Love your enemy. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

To put it another way, we are told, “love your brother, even if he doesn’t know that he is your brother. Love your sister, even if she doesn’t know that she is your sister. Forgive to a fare-thee-well. Be strong. Act boldly. Judge actions but not people, remembering that somewhere, we and they have a common ancestor who would do the same if she were still with us.

In fact she is still with us. We carry her in our very bones, we and our blood-brothers and sisters, all us survivors of the miracle, of the mystery of life, ongoing, never-ceasing, and never ceasing to amaze, ever pouring itself into new vessels, ever recreating itself, again and again.

Each of us is on an endless journey. My hope is that what we do here helps us each of us on that journey. I like to think that when we come together like this for a brief time in this restful room we call our sanctuary, that we are actually celebrating that journey. We celebrate the awesome gift of life and we pick each other up when we inevitably stumble. We come here to savor life and leave ready to serve life—to save the creation we are privileged to enjoy and save our brothers and sisters who need our help.

Each of us is on an endless journey. We may see but little of the road, raise but little of the dust, have only a brief time to contemplate the stars. It doesn’t matter. We are unbelievably and profoundly here. William Blake put it poetically:

To see the World in a grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

“Jim,” my good friend used to say when we would talk about such things, “we are in eternity now.”

“Yes, Dan, we are in eternity now, breathing the air, feeling the sun, listening to the water, digging our toes in the sand. And I will always love you.”

Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah.
Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah

My brothers and sisters are all on board, hallelujah.
My brothers and sisters are all on board, hallelujah. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .