A Return to the Wilderness

 

 For four days in August of this year I returned to my slice of heaven on earth: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This was my 9^th trip in 40 years. Five of those trips have been made from my homes in Miami, Florida and Savannah, Georgia, thus requiring a full two days of travel to get there and to return home. Clearly the lakes and rivers, spruce, pine and birch trees of the Northwoods of Minnesota have a strong pull on me. 

This pull even overrides the strong physical test and toll that it takes on my body each trip I make. This is a designated Wilderness Area, which means no motorized transportation is allowed. The only way to enter is by canoe or on foot. You must transport all your equipment and food for your time in the wilderness by canoe or backpack. This involves paddling fully loaded canoes up and across lakes, sometimes battling strong headwinds, portaging your canoes and equipment on rocky trails or across beaver dams to access rivers and streams that connect the lakes. All in search of a campsite where you then must unload all your gear, set-up your tent, rain tarp, hang your bear ropes to hang your food pack at night, and then see to your meals! It returns life to the basics, securing food, shelter, security. 

But this is all done while you are surrounded by the most beautiful, glorious canvas of blues and greens, browns and whites. With fluffy clouds scudding across the deep blue sky on sunny days and ominous, low hanging gray clouds when overcast. The weather is constantly changing and often in dramatic ways. The water is crystal clear and, though the outfitters and National Forest Service warn you to sterilize your water before consuming it, (and there is risk of bacterial infection) still you can drink it if you do so far enough from shore and it tastes cold and pure and better than any tap water! 

So, while visiting the wilderness is challenging and hard on me physically, it is just the opposite for me emotionally and spiritually. The wilderness is renewing and freeing and relaxing. My mind and my heart and my spirit breathe more deeply and freely in the wilderness. That is why I have returned again and again, now for 9 times. 

It is also a place where I have always been able to journal, faithfully and prolifically. In the wilderness I am able to write freely and deeply, exploring life and my inner self. What else is there to do here, beyond meeting your basic needs for living? I easily find the time, focus, and energy for writing. In the Northwoods, off the technology grid, it is just me, and the loons, birds, fish, mosquitoes, flies, trees, lakes, and my own thoughts. It is a perfect setting for reflection, meditation, contemplation, and writing.

So, with this introduction, you have probably surmised I am hoping to revive this blog: Sabbath Tango. I have many more thoughts to share which I will be posting (be patient with me as I am now back home and no longer in the wilderness and daily life intrudes much more on this activity of writing and sharing) in the days to come.

 

The intimacy of the air we breathe

I was raised in a Christian home. I was also raised to value education and I received a good education in the public schools of St. Louis, MO. My parents valued that education, until they gravitated back to a more biblically literal approach to their faith.  Then they questioned whether they had provided me and my siblings the proper education or had corrupted us with one too secular.

 

But I have always appreciated my education, especially my exposure to and training in the sciences. My love for science was midwifed in me by my 5^th grade teacher who shared with us her own love for science and experimentation. That love was nurtured all through High School and into my early years of college. I was a good student in my science classes and I was on a track to become a scientist; until I felt a call to become a minister.

 

While my education in the sciences ceased at that point, my love and appreciation for science never waned. I never felt a dichotomy or adversarial relationship between my faith-based approach to life and the scientific explanations for life. Science explained the world and life. Religious faith provided meaning and purpose to the world and life. They were complementary views and understandings, not contradictory or competing systems of meaning.

 

All of which is preface to the statement that I am befuddled by the current antagonism toward science in our nation! Johannes Kepler, a 17^th century mathematician and astronomer once wrote about his own work: “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.” And Albert Einstein said: “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”

 

Both Religion and Science seek to provide a cosmology: an understanding of the origin of life in the universe. For religion that cosmology is informed by creation stories and holy writings. For Science it is informed by scientific observation and tested theories. Whether that story is about a Big Bang, or God speaking creation into being out of nothing, or thinking creation into being, or bringing creation into being out of some cosmic battle or struggle, all the stories are trying to offer an understanding of the beginning of the universe as well as teach us something about current life and reality.

 

What current scientific understanding teaches us about origins and life today through the theories of the Big Bang and Evolution is that everything in the universe – and I do mean EVERY. SINGLE. THING. – is intimately connected.

 

Canadian blogger, Jim Taylor, once shared a reflection inspired by watching the bubbles in his glass of Guinness separate into foam and dark beer. He recalled how one cosmologist, Angela Tilby, in her book Science and the Soul, poetically described the evolutionary process of the Universe as “spacetime foam”. Out of the explosive beginning, as that foam of energy particles expanded it began creating space and time. Eventually the foam began settling into its components.  Sub-atomic particles coalesced into atoms, into molecules. Gravity began pulling molecules together. Crushed closely, they generated heat; compressed, they began fusing into more complex molecules. The fusion created more heat. In the fullness of time, it blew some of those new starts apart and blasted heavier molecules out into space.

 

Gravity clumped some of those heavier molecules together, and formed rocky planets, like ours. On these planets some complex carbon-based molecules continued fusing.  But instead of creating heat, they created life – plants – which exhaled oxygen as a waste product. The oxygen levels of this planet increased from zero to around 20 per cent. New forms of life emerged from the seething stew to make use of this un-utilized raw material – animals – us.

 

 Everything that exists today derives from that original “foam.” Everything, alive or dead; everything that was, or is, or will be – we are all related by our common origins. But not just by our origins. Jim Taylor also shared how Bob Sandford, chair of the United Nation’s Water for Life Decade, started one of his speeches by saying, “Every time you take a breath, you inhale the exhalation of every living thing on this planet since the beginning of life.”

 

We are all intimately related. By our breath, by the elements that make up our bodies, and by the fact that every molecule, every atom, can trace its origins back to that original foam.

 

But now, in the age of COVID, by our breath is the key learning here. When we breathe we are breathing in common air. You don’t have your own private bubble of air, nor do I. It is the same air which has existed on this planet since the dawn of plant life which began exhaling oxygen until it gave life to us. The oxygen on this planet – the air we breathe – is a shared resource. It gives us all life. It also can carry illness and death. Let us use the resource wisely and share as we were taught to do in Pre-school and Kindergarten.  And the way to wisely share is by wearing a mask when I am close to you and intimately sharing that air with you.

 

 

A Trip Becomes a Pilgrimage

I am convinced that pilgrimage is still a bona fide spirit-renewing ritual.  But I also believe in pilgrimage as a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler.  With a deepening focus, keen preparation, attention to the path below our feet, and respect for the destination at hand, it is possible to transform, even the most ordinary journey into a sacred journey, a pilgrimage.                             –Phil Cousineau, “The Art of Pilgrimage”

It was the second day of our trip to Paris, our first full day in France.  The skies were thick with dark clouds hanging low and threatening rain.  It was not an ideal day for visiting the cathedral in Chartres, so famous for the amazing colors, vibrant blues and deep purples, of its stained glass windows.  But this is Friday and the only day when there is a “possibility” of walking the labyrinth inlaid in the floor of the central nave.  There is no guarantee.  Normally chairs cover the entire nave, arranged in cathedral seating with a center aisle and two sections of wooden chairs for people to rest, to sit and pray, and to worship.  But Friday is the one day when, unless something else is scheduled to take place in the nave, they will push back the chairs and expose the labyrinth.

Thus it was that I found myself sitting in the amazing Cathedral Notre Dame of Chartres watching about 20 people walking the labyrinth.  (That’s right; there are actually many Notre Dame Cathedrals in France, which translates “Our Lady,” for they are usually dedicated to Mary.)  As I began writing my thoughts in my journal to prepare myself for walking the labyrinth, it slowly dawned upon my how important this experience was to me.  We did not go to France so that I could walk the labyrinth in Chartres.  This was not a pilgrimage.  Yet at that moment, sitting in that Cathedral, gathering my thoughts and beginning to listen deeply to my own spirit, it became clear walking this labyrinth was something I very much needed to do.  At that moment, as Cousineau suggests, my trip to France became a pilgrimage.

When did I become enamored of labyrinths?  I cannot recall.  Dianne and I visited San Francisco in 1995 which is home to Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal church where Lauren Artress serves as Rector.  Lauren is one of the founders of Veriditas, the organization promoting the resurgent use of labyrinths as spiritual prayer tools.  Dianne actually visited Grace Cathedral while I was in General Synod meetings and walked the labyrinth they have, but I did not.  I do recall an outdoor labyrinth at the retreat center in Lake Worth, Florida which I visited often in the late ‘90’s to see a Spiritual Director.  But that labyrinth does not feel like my first labyrinth.  I can remember walking the outdoor labyrinth at Ghost Ranch Retreat Center in New Mexico sometime before 2005.  And of course I helped build a labyrinth on the Christ Church campus in August of 2005.

Most of these labyrinths were all patterned after the Chartres labyrinth, an 11-circuit.  While it is not the only pattern for a labyrinth, it has become one of the most well-known.  At one time there were 17 labyrinths laid in the floors of cathedrals across medieval France.  The labyrinth in the Chartres cathedral, placed in the floor sometime between 1194 and 1220, is the only one which remains.  No one is quite sure why labyrinths became popular in medieval Europe.  Some feel it was to provide a “virtual” pilgrimage to Jerusalem for those who could not make the actual journey themselves.  There is some suggestion that pilgrims would walk the labyrinth on their knees to heighten the experience.

Some think of a labyrinth as a maze, but it is not a maze.  A maze is a puzzle, with dead ends and little reason or rhyme to the path.  A labyrinth is a path representing a journey.  There is one way in to the center and one way out and you cannot get lost (at least not intentionally) on the path.  It is a simple spiritual prayer tool; it offers a way to physically pray, not so much or just with words, but with one’s whole being – body, mind, heart and soul.  Every time I have ever walked a labyrinth it has been a powerful spiritual experience.

And so it was this time!  The opportunity to walk THIS labyrinth, in the Chartres Cathedral, at THIS moment in my life, was truly a Divine gift.  I arrived in Chartres after a very difficult summer in my ministry and my life.  I arrived carrying many burdens and many questions.  As I sat in that sacred space, I was able to focus my thoughts, gather up my emotions, my burdens, the experiences of my life in the past few months, and offer them up to God as I walked into the labyrinth.  Surrounded by the symbols of faith, the altar, the Communion Table, the beautiful stained glass windows telling the stories of the Bible and the Church; moving with other pilgrims, experiencing their devotion, adjusting my pace and rhythm to their pace on the path, pausing for them to pass; realizing I was walking the very same path hundreds of thousands if not millions of other pilgrims had walked since the 13^th century, nevertheless I was totally immersed in the moment, opening my heart, mind, and soul to the presence of God to allow God to lift my burdens and to speak to me God’s Word and God’s Wisdom.

I have no concept of the time I took in the labyrinth.  I did not rush through it, but I did not dawdle.  I moved at a steady pace, but I paused when it seemed appropriate and I drank in the amazing surrounding environment of the Cathedral.  I spent significant time in the center rosette, specifically sharing my questions and seeking God’s guidance and wisdom.  When I moved back outward on the path away from the center toward the entrance I did so with the intention of moving back to my life and back to the world.  I did not hear a “voice” or direct message from God, but I clearly had a sense in my heart and soul that God had lifted my burdens and God was giving my guidance.  I experienced the power of the labyrinth once again.  And the labyrinth ministered to my heart and soul as I needed at that moment.  I came away from that experience with a deep peace about myself, about my life and ministry, and about the future.