Experience: The Sacred Text of your Life

By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra

July 16, 2006;  Crestwood UCC

Eph. 2:8-10

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

I get several daily devotionals by email, one from a United Methodist minister I’ve never met, but who I really resonate with.  Last week he sent this one, saying:

I’m going on vacation.  To vacate: to leave your post empty.  To empty yourself. 

To really go on vacation is not just to get away and have fun.  It’s to

empty yourself. It’s to embrace the essence of your being, to simply be in

this world and not be defined or sustained by what you do, what you provide

or accomplish, what you are “worth.”   It is to repent of the idolatry of

work, the illusion that you can justify your existence.  On vacation you

experience the holy blessing of being who you are, not what you do.  On

vacation you are not a teacher or a doctor.  You are simply a person…

Vacation is Sabbath time.  Scripture gives two reasons for Sabbath. One is

that God worked for six days and then rested (Ex. 20.11) and the other is

that we were slaves in Egypt and God set us free ( Dt. 5.15).  Both ways,

the point is that our work does not sustain us; God does.   A vacation is a

time to know that the only reason you are alive is that God loves you.

To really be on vacation is to be empty of any purpose other than to live,

to be in this present moment.  You sit on a beach or swing in a hammock and

you are there, for no other reason than that you are there.  Your purpose is

to empty yourself of all purpose other than to be there.

Whether in meditation or on vacation, in desert pilgrimage or acts of

compassion and justice, it is in having nothing to offer that we find out

what we are truly worth.  It is in self-emptying that we discover the

fullness of life.

Those words by Steve Garnaas-Holmes were written just for me last week I think!  OK, so maybe his devotional applies to a lot of people, but I doubt anyone needs to hear them more than I do, or more than any of you other workaholics do.  Not 10 minutes before I read that devotional, I was planning what work to take with me on vacation to Chautuaqua—what could I do on my laptop while I was waiting for a lecture to start, or during a boring lecture, and then email back to the secretary here?  Now granted, Chautauqua is also continuing education for me, but I really find it hard not to take work with me everywhere in case I can snatch a few minutes of work time here and there.  I don’t even go to the carwash without something to read.

Two phrases keep coming back to me in Steve’s devotional.  The first is: To really be on vacation…is to empty yourself…it is to repent of the idolatry of work, the illusion that you can justify your existence. And the second one is… our work does not sustain us; God does.

This morning I’d like to challenge you to think about what you do that is self-emptying.  What do you do that gives you the chance to discover the fullness of life, and reconnect to the God who sustains you?  Do you take enough time to really enjoy and appreciate the people around you?   Do you take enough time to encounter nature and let its beauty feed your spirit?  When do you take time for contemplation, so you might glimpse the transcendent, and the deepest parts of yourself? 

Here is a good summer poem by Mary Oliver, in which the narrator seems to be a person who practices self-emptying mindfulness.  The title is Messenger.

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness

Here the quickening yeast: there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old?  Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?  Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work….

Which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,

A mouth with which to give shouts of joy

To the moth and wren, to the sleepy dug-out clam,

Telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

Kathleen Norris comments on this poem.  She says, “Imagine yourself at a party.  Introduced to a stranger, you ask, ‘What do you do?’  and comes the reply:  ‘My work is loving the world…my work is mostly standing still, and learning to be astonished.’ “

Crackpot…you think, or maybe not. Perhaps you are thinking: ‘How can I get a job like that?’  The truth, as Mary Oliver’s poem makes clear, is that this work is available to us all.  It is the work of someone who takes the time to listen, to smell, to taste, and see,  It does not matter if you don’t have sunflowers or hummingbirds in view: a city landscape of buildings and people will do just fine  There is plenty to wonder at there, and if you look up, you may see hawks soaring in the sky.  Or storm clouds eclipsing the tops of skyscrapers.  We live in a time when anxiety and road rage are rampant, wile gratitude and wonder seem to be in short supply.  All the more important, then, to take the time to read this poem out loud, and imagine something better for yourself, in this exotic and beautiful world we call home.”¹   By the way, copies of Mary Oliver’s poem are in the narthex.

Are you taking time to wonder at the life God has given you?  Even Jesus took time apart.  I love this little text in Mark: For many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat.  And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.  I wonder, did Jesus take a long meandering walk by himself?  Did he lie on his back and look up at the clouds and let a feeling of oneness with life fill his soul that day?  Don’t you wonder what inspired him to believe that God loves us beyond our wildest imaginations?  Don’t you wonder what energized him to teach about a radical love that takes in all of creation?  Jesus had a sense of awe in relation to the power he called Father.

The role of experience in helping us know God has not always held a place of honor as a source of religious knowledge.  Like so many searchers in other ancient religions, the Psalmist undoubtedly valued life’s experiences as a primary way to know God.  The Psalmists’ experiences obviously shaped their understanding of life and of God.  But after the birth of the Christian church, for generations it was the hierarchy—the bishops and the pope who largely defined religious experience for people.  After the Reformation it was more often the Bible that was seen as the only source of religious truth.  There were always those who demurred and claimed the power of experience as a way to discover the deeper truths of life.

In the middle of the 19^th century, that idea took hold in America and the Transcendentalist movement emerged, primarily out of Unitarianism, which by the way, was an offshoot of the Congregationalists in New England, our religious ancestors.  The Transcendentalists included people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  They valued direct experience of the transcending mystery and wonder that moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the force that creates and sustains life.

The Transcendentalists asserted that religious knowledge came not from the written scriptures but rather through direct encounters with the Divine, what Emerson called The Oversoul.  For Transcendentalists, religious truth was revealed both through nature and through the direct intuitive union of the individual psyche with the divine.  They would have agreed with contemporary writer Sam Keen who says, “The experience of discerning the sacred is not available on the secondhand market.” 

We UCC’ers tend to believe that we discern the sacred through the scriptures, which are the record of other people’s experiences of God and which hold great wisdom, distilled through the ages.  But we also appreciate experience as another way of knowing that which we call sacred.

I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem, Miracles:

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,

Or sit at tables at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of the stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring:

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—

The ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there? 

Walt Whitman clearly didn’t need any person or any book to tell him what was sacred and miraculous.

Awhile back I came across something Albert Einstein wrote.  We think of Einstein as a scientific genius, but he also had some things to say about his religious beliefs.  In a writing which he entitled My Credo, Einstein says:

The most beautiful and deepest experience a [person] can have is the sense of the mysterious.  It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science.  He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.  To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.” 

We talk a lot here about working to bring justice and peace to the world.  But if we are to respond to the needs and cries of the world, we need to also find contemplative ways to rest in the power of God’s presence and grace.  I don’t usually give assignments anymore, now that I am no longer a teacher.  But if I were giving you an assignment today, it would be to do just that—to go out and spend time doing what inspires awe in you.  Seek the transcending mystery and wonder that is available to all who have ears to hear, eyes to see, and bodies to feel—in nature, with those whom you love, or in whatever environment helps you glimpse what is too big for words.  Maybe it’s listening to extraordinary music like we heard played here today, maybe it’s watching a sunset. 

Wherever it is, I hope you pay attention to the experiences that give you moments of wonder, insight, or awe, for those are the sacred texts of your life, and not to be missed!  May it be so.