The Spiritual Practice of Getting Lost

/ Sermons

Thought to ponder at the beginning:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.
That’s where the most important things come from,
where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

 

Reading 670 The Way, Edwin Muir In: Singing the Living Tradition

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.

Is there another way?
The way is one.

I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.

Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.

Then I’ll make here my place –
The road runs on –

Stay here, forever stay.
None stays here, none.

I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.

Oh, places I have passed!
That journey’s done.

And what will come at last?
The way leads on.

Reading from A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless; shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance,the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

I hate getting lost, feeling lost, being lost. Where it comes to navigating my physical world, I seldom have to encounter that uncomfortable, lost feeling. I have a good sense of direction. Even when I don’t know quite where I am I usually remain confident I will find my way to where I am going. So it may seem surprising that today I take up the spiritual practice of getting lost.

Of course I do get lost sometimes. Like the wedding I did in South Portland last summer. The brides had opted for no rehearsal. We had planned to walk through the ceremony together an hour before the actual wedding. But, they never sent me directions, Mapquest didn’t recognize the address they gave me, they weren’t answering their cell phone, I was completely unfamiliar with South Portland, and the handmade signs they had set up for guests were too small for me to see from my car. So I got lost. And I thoroughly hated it. The more I tried to find my way, the more panicky I became. And the more panicky I became, the harder it was to think straight. My inner critic took over, letting me know in every possible way that I had blown it and the wedding would be ruined.

That’s how it often is when people feel lost. Feelings of panic arise, displacing all hope of calm, logical thinking. Self-blame and self-loathing can overtake. One can easily slip into a pit of self-doubt, fear, and misery. The spiritual practice of getting lost is to walk though the distress – to walk through it and reach a new destination altogether.

Of course, I did find my way to the wedding eventually, arriving 40 minutes in advance instead of 60. Everything worked out fine, and my humility, if it had been lacking in any way, was restored. Getting there required taking lots of deep, calming breaths so that I could engage my brain again. Getting there meant admitting I was lost, and stopping to ask for help. Getting there put me eye-to-eye with my fallibility and imperfection – always good ingredients for the spiritual
journey.

Not long after that experience, I was reviewing one of my favorite books: An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor. An Episcopal priest who left parish ministry, Taylor now teaches religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. I love her earthy and down-to-earth approach to theology.

In The Altar in the World, Taylor plumbs the depths of everyday experiences, finding opportunities for spiritual practice in the ordinary. One of the chapters in the book is titled, “The Practice of Getting Lost.” Taylor, who lives on a farm and shares her space with a herd of cows, talks about the cow paths of our lives – the worn ways we have established for getting from here to there – and the value of stepping off those paths once in a while. She begins by speaking of quitting the literal cow paths on the land where she lives.

Once you leave the cow path, she says, the unpredictable territory is full of life.True, you cannot always see where you are putting your feet. This means you can no longer afford to stay unconscious. You can no longer count on the beat-down red dirt path making all your choices for you. Leaving it, you make your own choices for a spell. You agree to become aware of every step you take, tuning all of your senses to exactly where you are and exactly what you are doing.

When I do this, I hear the buzzing of the yellow jackets in time to take a detour around their front door. I see the gap in the grass around the groundhog hole in time to step around it. I sing old Baptist hymns to warn the snakes that I am coming. They do not want to see me any more than I want to see them, after all. What I see instead is the tiny wild blue iris that grows close to the ground. I see the round bed in the tall grass where the doe sleeps with her twin fawns at night, and the hornet’s nest no bigger than a fist, hanging from the underside of a thistle leaf.

My experience resonates with Taylor’s:Getting off the beaten path is often a feast for the eyes, a feast for curiosity, and a stimulant for consciousness and attentiveness. In my family, I am known for finding the “back way” – the unfrequented route – between here and there. I love discovering new ways of getting around and expanding my world so that I can assemble the puzzle pieces of various locations in my mind. I love discovering, then knowing, where things come out.

But the spiritual practice of getting lost isn’t simply about or determining where all the roads in the city or trails in the conservation land lead. Barbara Brown Taylor says practicing getting lost in our physical spaces helps prepare us for when we get lost in other, deeper ways. And that’s why it’s good to engage the practice – so that we are equipped for the inevitable. For we are bound to spend some time in our lives feeling lost.

I felt lost when I left college with a degree in English and American Literature and not a clue of what to do, lost in soul-numbing years of working as a technical writer and editor, lost when convoluted relationships left me confused and angry, lost when the death of loved ones cast me out to sea, lost so many countless times in so many countless ways in my life. You may have felt lost at times, too. Some of us may feel lost today, this moment.

Whether we want it or not (and usually we don’t), whether we expect it or not (and usually we don’t), life has a way of serving up events that blast us off our cow paths and propel us into the unknown, the scary, the mystifying – and there we are, suddenly trying to avoid the groundhog holes, yellow jacket nests, and timber rattlers we are sure are lurking in the tall grass. At such times we leave the illusory land of certainty and find ourselves in uncharted regions without a compass and unable to see the movement of the guiding stars overhead. We find ourselves Lost.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s poem, “Afraid So,” is, for me, a wonderful description of how we can get lost in the ordinary.

“Afraid So,” by Jeanne Marie Beaumontiii

Is it starting to rain?
Did the check bounce?
Are we out of coffee?
Is this going to hurt?
Could you lose your job?
Did the glass break?
Was the baggage misrouted?
Will this go on my record?
Are you missing much money?
Was anyone injured?
Is the traffic heavy?
Do I have to remove my clothes?
Will it leave a scar?
Must you go?
Will this be in the papers?
Is my time up already?
Are we seeing the understudy?
Will it affect my eyesight?
Did all the books burn?
Are you still smoking?
Is the bone broken?
Will I have to put him to sleep?
Was the car totaled?
Am I responsible for these charges?
Are you contagious?
Will we have to wait long?
Is the runway icy?
Was the gun loaded?
Could this cause side effects?
Do you know who betrayed you?
Is the wound infected?
Are we lost?
Will it get any worse?
Afraid so. Lost.

In that unaccustomed terrain, where our footsteps are unsure, we come toe-to-toe with Mystery, capital M. There lessons await, if we open ourselves to them.We can learn about vulnerability. Everyone is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. If today we are well, warm, replete with nourishing food, anchored in loving relationships, comfortable with a roof overhead, that could all change tomorrow. If not tomorrow, at some point our luck will run out. At the least, our very lives will, at some point, expire.

This past week a family contacted me for help: They had been evicted from their apartment the day before, and they were living in their van. Under shelter one day, homeless the next. Meeting that family helped me remember I am not immune to misfortune. I am vulnerable, just as they are. Bringing that vulnerability to the center of my awareness rekindled my compassion – for them, for myself, for the human condition – and compelled me to keep the real world I occupy alive in my consciousness, the real world where people live in their vans in the Hannaford parking lot, the real world where that could easily be me.

From the seat of vulnerability, we may finding ourselves having to ask others for help, just as that family sought my help. Our car battery died in some little town in Indiana last summer. It was Sunday afternoon. Everything was locked up tight on that Main Street. The street was empty of people and even cars. No gas station was within sight.

We walked down Main Street and found a convenience store. Stepping inside, we explained that we needed a jump start. Where was the nearest gas station, we asked? The man in the store said, “Oh, I’ll help you.” He left his post, followed us back down the street, and gave us a jump start so that we could be on our way. It was just a little thing, really. After all, how many of us have helped someone jump start their car? But we left that town warmed by the knowledge that a complete stranger had gone out of his way to help us.

For many, asking for help is uncomfortable, but receiving help from others connects us to the web of life and the realities of our own precarious existence. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about a head injury she received while riding horseback:

People cared for me when I could not care for myself. When I was knocked out cold, someone called the ambulance for me. Someone stitched my head. When no member of my family knew where I was, a stranger brought me food. Since I have made a point all my life of being the one who brings the food, not the one who needs it, this reversal did wonders for me. To receive the hospitality of strangers changed me far more than providing it ever did.

The spiritual practice of getting lost can bring us, ultimately, to wisdom. In my life, perhaps in yours, too, the hardships have taught me the most. Finding my way through quagmires of loss and confusion, working my way through swamps of grieving, and attending to disorienting chaos have been my best teachers.

We have come to know that, too, as a congregation. The church fire jolted us off our cow path. Since then we have recovered from the initial trauma, mined the wellspring of our collective spirits to discover new, flexible ways of being a congregation together while we have been strangers in a strange land, and determined our way forward through the discomfiting morass our loss initially
caused. There were no cow paths for us to follow, no manuals explaining what to do after a church fire (believe me, I checked), no signposts pointing the way.

Adversity forced us to navigate through the wilds. We are stronger as a result – for we know both the tenderness and tenacity at the heart of our congregation. And we are wiser – for we know without doubt that what holds us together is our relationship to one another, the ethics we share, and a fierce hunger for Ultimacy, or Mystery, or God, or the wellspring of meaning, or that which we hold most high. However we name or understand it, here we give ourselves space to explore it.

And that is no surprise. After all, the world’s religions tell stories of getting lost and gaining wisdom. The ancient Israelites were lost in the desert for 40 years, the story tells us. Have you looked at a map? They were only going from here to there!

But it took them 40 years to make that journey, and during that time they learned how to be a people together. Jesus was led into the wilderness where the devil tempted him. The Buddha left his safe palace to spend years seeking then enlightenment he finally found while meditating under a bodhi tree. Teen-aged Australian Aboriginal boys gain their manhood by going walkabout – a solo journey through the desert, often lasting months, in which the boys discover their own strength and trace the mythological history of their people, thereby cultivating the insights of manhood. Finding one’s way through the desert, the wilderness, the tall grasses is an apt metaphor for spiritual awakening – in ancient times and for us,
today.

Rebecca Solnit describes the light waves that get lost and paint our world a vivid blue.

This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue, she writes.

Perhaps in getting lost sometimes ourselves, we hew out some space where the light of wisdom can shine in and through us. Those places where our vulnerability rises to the top, our world turns upside down to force us to see with new eyes, our universe becomes re-ordered – those places can accrue, ultimately, to illuminate us with our own beauty, the beauty of a soul that has left the cow path and discovered something much, much bigger that the small world we once occupied. So get lost! Go face-to-face with the unknown. Cultivate the inner beauty such a journey might inspire. Embrace mystery.