The
Heart of the Matter
Sunday,
September 28, 2008
Rev. Janice Palm
Texts:
Exodus 17:1-7; Matthew
21:23-32
About
fifteen years ago Annie Dillard wrote her first book of fiction,
The Living, an historical novel about the European American
settling of the great northwest. She's written: The Writing
Life, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Tickets
for a Prayer Wheel, Teaching a Stone to Talk. Perhaps you
are familiar with her writings? The impression left with me from
her northwest novel is the incredible dense, tall, enclosing,
darkened, claustrophobia-inducing forests on the west coast that
had to be penetrated in order to get to the coast and in order
to make any sort of settling possible.
I
raise that fact of life the northern Europeans and Chinese workers
encountered because it was the environment in which Native Americans
of the Northwest lived. Survival for the Native Americans depended
on knowing where they were in the woods. Survival depended on
their not getting forever lost, cut off from the rest of the tribe
in the thick, maze of trees. David Whyte tells of how Native Americans
passed on from one generation to another the ability of knowing
where one was. Elders would share how youth would be placed in
the forests and learn the signs of where they were and how they
could return to their home tribe. (Mind you the youth were not
abandoned; the elders knew full well where the youth were.) David
Wagoner translated into English a poem expressing that knowledge
passed on from the Elders in this poem called:
Lost
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
From
our Exodus text, we certainly get the feeling that the people
following Moses are lost. Indeed they were in the wilderness and
Yahweh was not making any shortcuts in this trip out of the wilderness
into the land of milk and honey! Because there was no water around,
the people were thirsty. So they chided one another; they clamored
against Moses: like children asking for the 100th time, Are we
there yet? Where are we anyway? We need something to drink now.
On
different levels, we, too, are lost. If you have read a paper,
listened or seen the news in the last week or so, you are aware
of the great anxiety hovering over and around financial institutions,
jobs, pensions, housing, and loans. The government is looking
to address the situation; we wait for some resolutions to happen
over this weekend. Mixed up in all this is politics. Added to
this soup pot of questions is our own status and our wondering
what will happen to our well-being.
Indeed,
we ARE lost in a wilderness.
David
Whyte wrote five years ago in The Heart Aroused Poetry and
the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America how Enron
got lost; it lost its beginning vision and mission; it lost the
ability to ask: why are we buying/building? With over confidence,
the mission twisted into acquisition for acquisition-sake, and
fabrications. Enron created a world of its own, in its own image.
No one stopped in the woods - to assess what was around them,
what was reality.
The
Hebrew people did stop in the wilderness and clamored about their
thirst. We are not sure exactly where they stopped. There are
arguments over the location. For us the significance is that they
stopped, they assessed what was missing, they realized their thirst,
and so demanded to have their thirst quenched.
I
can just imagine Moses being at his wits end. It would be like
entertaining the high school junior class in the back yard and
making sure there's enough lemonade when the kids wanted soda.
Again,
Whyte lifts up how years ago Apple Computer stopped in the woods
and assessed where they were. They looked reality in the face
and said we need to retool/refocus or we're toast.
Today's
world has us moving, moving, moving. Leaders give less and less
time to standing still. Companies/universities/government expect
results. The momentum forward is often enticing and often demanding
us to keep going on that path forward. Our schedules get tighter
and tighter so that it becomes hard to say, no, thanks. I need
to recoup.
But
again, the Hebrews knew to stop, assess that they were really
thirsty. We, today, are a thirsty people, too. Moses went to the
Source. Moses, through the Lord, provided thirst quenching drink.
I
had forgotten until I was in the midst of some reading
this last week, the long trip through the Sinai wilderness is
bracketed with two stories of thirst quenching water coming from
stone. It's a double reminder for them/for the reader/for us.
Take stock. Stop. Stand still. Consider that thirst. Consider
the Source.
I
am in the second year of taking a Spiritual Director's Training
Course. It's not so much that I am seeking credit or accreditation
as a Spiritual Director; in many ways I already serve in that
capacity and it is a natural path for me. I confess that I am
taking this course because of the retreat time, the readings,
and the intentionality I have had to give to my own spiritual
growth and relationship building/ listening to God. For me, it's
a way to stand still. Listen.
Debra
Farrington has written a wonderful book: Hearing with the Heart
A Gentle Guide to Discerning God's Will for Your Life. In
it she speaks first to the issue of heart. She reminds one of
the story of Solomon who asks God for a hearing heart. Solomon
is known to us as one possessing great wisdom. Farrington says
that one who has a hearing heart does more than listen; the heart
hears with compassion and it knows God's will. The heart for the
Hebrew people was the center of the human being - physical, emotional,
intellectual center. Feelings, moods, passions, wisdom all resided
within the heart. So for Solomon to be asking for a hearing heart,
Solomon was asking that God's will reside in his heart/in the
center of his being.
I
believe that's what the Hebrew people in the wilderness were thirsting
for when they made their demands to Moses. At the end of our reading,
they asked, is the Lord in our midst? I believe that is what we
ask as well. Deep underneath all our layers of protection, that's
what we thirst after, too: To have God's will reside within us/our
lives.
Sometimes
we get stuck in our understanding and journey because our language
and way of expressing the inexpressible get us hemmed in in our
way of thinking of God. We know that God is greater than a super
human being. We know that God is beyond the great benefactor,
Santa Claus in the sky or the bearded judge sitting by a gate.
But it is hard to find the words to describe our experience of
God without using human attributes. We forget it's a matter of
perspective!
Too
often we fall into the trap that God's will, what we seek, is
one path - that there is one right path and we better be on that
one or else. But the real heart of the matter is to Stand still.
Listen. You are not lost. I am in your midst. Listen so that you
may hear and I will find you/you will find me.
Marjorie
Hewitt Suchocki, a theologian who I heard speak many years ago
and who gave a series of talks at our Annual Conference three
years ago, suggests in her book: In God's Presence: Theological
Reflections on Prayer that we think of God as water and ourselves
as living in that water. She says:
