Deserts and Downtowns
September 27, 2009
September 27, 2009
The Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 35:1-7; Romans 8:28-39
Think of a desert, and most of us think of some variety or another of harsh, mostly barren, hot, dry, empty place – it is true that this landform got its name from the fact that it is largely deserted by humans. The conditions of the desert are hard for humans to live with. A desert is defined as someplace with less than 10 inches of annual rainfall. Deserts may be flat or mountainous – northern Arizona has desert regions over a mile high. While most deserts are hot, often over 100 degrees, at night the temperatures can plummet. And there are also cold deserts – such as Antarctica. Deserts account for about 1/3 of the earth's land surface. The photo on your bulletin is from the desert in Israel at Qumran where the Dead Sea scrolls were found – the greatest single collection of original Biblical texts. What's most significant, perhaps, about deserts is that they are an extreme land form – extremely dry, often extremely hot, sometimes extremely cold, usually extremely unpopulated, although there are some peoples who traditionally make their home in the desert, peoples such as the Bedouin tribes in the Middle East, or the Navaho and Anasazi in the United States.
While it might seem as if the desert is invulnerable due to its already harsh conditions, climate change is impacting desert climates also. Fires destroy the vegetation, which is then replaced with faster-growing varieties, leading to change in how life is supported. And the earth is increasingly subject to desertification, a phenomena in which lands become desert.
The desert was important throughout the Bible, of course – the children of Israel walked through the desert for forty years after gaining their freedom from slavery in Egypt. They were often angry, confused, and wanting an easier path to the Promised Land – but they were never alone. God was with them always, God’s presence in a cloud by day and a fiery pillar by night reminded them that God was with them.
The desert was important to the early Church – the first monastics were people known as the Desert Fathers – the earliest of them practiced both monasticism and solitude, living alone in caves in the desert, as the fourth century began in the common era. Soon, however, communal monasticism became the norm, as developed by Basil (in the East) and Benedict (in the West).
Monasticism is an extreme spirituality, a withdrawing from the world in order to radically engage with God – author Ernest Boyer, Jr. describes it as “life on the edge” and contrasts it with “life at the center” – the life that all of us lead: a life involving work, family, volunteer work, commitments, schedules, and ongoing engagement with the world. Sometimes, those of us who live life at the center have a yearning for life at the edge – it seems simpler somehow. And some of us take time each day for “quiet time” and maybe even time to time escape for some kind of retreat. Some of the women from our church will be gathering with other women in the Presbytery for a retreat next Friday and Saturday. Those times away are wonderful, but most days, many of us (including most clergy I know) struggle to find any substantive quiet time in our usual routines. We have a hard time making it out to the desert. Beyond the logistical issues, life in the desert, monastic life has its own challenges. Boyer further describes these challenges, writing “It is a life of total vulnerability. To surrender fully to that longing for transformation is to be willing to relinquish all that you are in order to become all that you can become.”
Of course, sometimes life takes us to the desert, to that vulnerability, in ways that are far less welcome: we find ourselves suffering – with chronic pain, with a frightening diagnosis, with a disintegrating relationship, with mental illness, with an economic crisis – and suddenly we are on the edge, grappling with vulnerability, and feeling (often) very much alone. There is certainly a sense in which all suffering is solitary – but there is another sense in which all suffering is shared. Most people have undergone some experience of suffering – so that someone who has lost a very dear friend, probably has some sense of what another person who has lost a loved one is likely to be experiencing; those who have suffered with chronic knee pain can surely empathize with someone who has ongoing back pain; at some level the loneliness of a relationship ending can be similar to the loneliness of a job loss. And while each of us can find some comfort in the companionship of others during these times of extremes, there is also a sense in which, as the choir sang, we have to go and stand our trials by ourselves. And it is there, where we are alone, that we meet God in the desert. And we find that, harsh as the desert is, there really are streams in the desert – God is caring for us, even there.
And like Elijah, who ran away to the desert when King Ahab and Queen Jezebel were threatening him with death, we may find God in the silence then – in those times of prayer, of journaling, of meditation. Just as the Hebrew people with Moses looked out in the desert in the night and saw the fiery pillar and realized that God was with them, so too might any of us look to God at those extreme times, when we find ourselves alone or vulnerable in ways that feel extreme to us.
Indeed, suffering is one of the times that draws us into the heart of God, much as the contemplative approach does. So whether we seek the desert or find ourselves thrust there, the solitude, silence, and vulnerability render us more open to God, and indeed, more hungry for God, than when life is going well, or when we are busy at the center of life.
But life at the center is hallowed, too. Indeed, all of the prophets, priests, and kings of the Bible are remembered for what they did in their comings and goings not their being still, their speaking not their silence, their being with others not their solitude – in what Boyer calls “life at the center”. They served God downtown more than in the desert.
All of you have heard me talk about the contemplative dimension of life, and I think, upon reflection, that I have provided an imbalanced vision of spirituality. To be sure, there is a place in life for the desert disciplines of stillness, silence and solitude, but for most of us these are rare moments, and for some of us, the contemplative tradition feels foreign and fruitless. We don’t like stillness, in silence we hear only our own loud thoughts, and solitude makes us nervous. Combining the three doesn’t make them more palatable. Now, as an aside, I would love to help each person find their way to some time in the contemplative tradition – much as the art teacher would love to help the confirmed non-artist find their creative side. There are ways that people can learn contemplation, but not everyone wants to, and let me say clearly that it’s not the only way to experience God. I should also state clearly that when I talk about the contemplative dimension, one could also say the transcendent dimension, or the spiritual mind – I’m trying to describe that sense of connection to God and to life beyond ourselves, in the community and the world, which is essential to the spiritual life. Life in God is not a solitary enterprise – even though some people find solitude to be an important pathway to connecting with God and the world. Relationality is the essential component of life in God – we recognize our essential relatedness. We are in relationship with God and with others and with the world.
And it is certainly possible to come to a deep sense of that without going to the desert.
As some of you may remember, I have found the insights of a Franciscan priest, Father Richard Rohr, to be helpful. Rohr’s most recent book is called The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See. Yesterday he gave a talk via webcast on the internet, and I was able to see it. The talk was very interesting – Rohr is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and speaks of the connections between action and contemplation. He describes the goal of contemplation to be the development of what he calls “non-dual thinking – a way of thinking that is not so much analytical as transcendent: it is more about the essential connections between things than the distinctions between things. And in his talk he had spent some time on why both modes of thinking were important. And as he usually does, he spoke about the importance of contemplation, as a path to this kind of non-dualistic thinking. After the talk, there was some time for questions and answers, so I typed in my question. And I was so delighted to hear the moderator say when it was almost done, “We have time for one more question, from Susan Zencka of Stevens Point, WI.” My question was about those people who are not drawn to contemplation. I asked: what about active spirituality? Is there a path to experiencing God that is not contemplative? I knew that many others had written about this, but I wanted to hear Rohr’s perspective, because he writes so compellingly about contemplation.
I was delighted with his answer – he said, “Absolutely.” In fact, there are many people who are active, and who are not well-suited to the contemplative tradition, because of their active minds and restless energy. He in fact said that he had been told early on that because of his personality, “Sitting meditation is something you can do, but it will always be a stretch – you might be better off with walking meditation…” and then he continued, adding “You don’t need to become a Buddhist zen practitioner to become a non dual thinker, but you DO need to practice deep love and deep suffering.” He explained that deep love creates a vulnerability in which we give ourselves to others, and in deep suffering we give up control. He reminded us that most people will not take up meditation, and that there are other ways to develop the spiritual mind, which he calls non-dual thinking. He spoke of how we in the West suffer from NDD, nature deficit disorder, and that by spending time in the natural world regularly, and letting the trees, birds, and rivers speak to us, we can come to the contemplative mind. “Let animals, nature, the sun, the moon and stars convert you,” he concluded.
Well, well, well. I was really excited about this yesterday, because my sermon was already going to be about different ways of coming to spirituality, and how the active life can also be a path to experiencing God. A couple of years ago, I started reading Parker Palmer’s The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring and had been very impressed with Palmer’s analysis of this same issue. He writes: “Contemplation and action ought not to be at war with one another, and as long as they are, we will be at war within ourselves…contemplation and action are not contradictions, but poles of a great paradox that can and must be held together ….Contemplation and action are not high skills or specialties for the virtuoso few. They are the warp and weft of human life, the interwoven threads that form the fabric of who we are and who we are becoming.”
And this is the point that Ernest Boyer, Jr. makes in his book about life at the center and life at the edges. The book is titled Finding God at Home: Family Life as Spiritual Discipline. In it, Boyer describes how caring for one another can be sacrament, that the routines of life can be liturgy – an echo of Parker Palmer’s discussions of work, creativity and caring.
Spirituality lies in how we approach what we do. If we, in our busy lives, care for others as a way to serve God, paying attention to people in the same focused, grateful way we might contemplate a sunset, we can experience God while living at the center. If we in our faithful lives, pray as a way to make ourselves feel better, and do the tasks of faith with self-righteousness or resentment, then we might miss God because our devotion is really aimed at ourselves.
We are all different, and just as I believe that God didn’t create so much variety within human experience only to expect us all to come to God in the same religious tradition, so have I come to believe that as different folks, God doesn’t only connect with Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Baha’i and the rest of humankind through the one practice of silence and contemplation. The desert may be a large portion of the earth, but life contains a number of habitats, and just as some of us live in the woods, while others live in the desert; so too, some of us experience God through contemplation, and others through a more active engagement with God – and many of us find richness in trying different ways of praying, different ways of reflecting, different paths in knowing God and ourselves in God. While the desert may be a rich and wonderful place of prayer for some, it’s inhospitable for others. But if we find ourselves there, unexpectedly, let’s be open to the gifts and abundant life that lie even within its extremes. And for those of us who find ourselves more at home downtown, there may be room in our days for moments in the desert – a candle lit a the table, a bowl of rocks to remind us of the natural world, an opportunity between commitments for 5 minutes of silence and rest. In the spirit of non-dual thinking, our lives don’t have to be either-or; we can enjoy the busyness and engagement of life at the center, while finding moments to take ourselves to the edge. Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote a book on meditation called Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Indeed, wherever we go, there we are, and if we can begin to be present to where we are, we will be on the way to finding life at the edge, right at the center. And so indeed we will find all things working for good… and that nothing, not heights, nor depths, neither silence nor noise, neither busyness nor stillness nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Amen.
The Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 35:1-7; Romans 8:28-39
Think of a desert, and most of us think of some variety or another of harsh, mostly barren, hot, dry, empty place – it is true that this landform got its name from the fact that it is largely deserted by humans. The conditions of the desert are hard for humans to live with. A desert is defined as someplace with less than 10 inches of annual rainfall. Deserts may be flat or mountainous – northern Arizona has desert regions over a mile high. While most deserts are hot, often over 100 degrees, at night the temperatures can plummet. And there are also cold deserts – such as Antarctica. Deserts account for about 1/3 of the earth's land surface. The photo on your bulletin is from the desert in Israel at Qumran where the Dead Sea scrolls were found – the greatest single collection of original Biblical texts. What's most significant, perhaps, about deserts is that they are an extreme land form – extremely dry, often extremely hot, sometimes extremely cold, usually extremely unpopulated, although there are some peoples who traditionally make their home in the desert, peoples such as the Bedouin tribes in the Middle East, or the Navaho and Anasazi in the United States.
While it might seem as if the desert is invulnerable due to its already harsh conditions, climate change is impacting desert climates also. Fires destroy the vegetation, which is then replaced with faster-growing varieties, leading to change in how life is supported. And the earth is increasingly subject to desertification, a phenomena in which lands become desert.
The desert was important throughout the Bible, of course – the children of Israel walked through the desert for forty years after gaining their freedom from slavery in Egypt. They were often angry, confused, and wanting an easier path to the Promised Land – but they were never alone. God was with them always, God’s presence in a cloud by day and a fiery pillar by night reminded them that God was with them.
The desert was important to the early Church – the first monastics were people known as the Desert Fathers – the earliest of them practiced both monasticism and solitude, living alone in caves in the desert, as the fourth century began in the common era. Soon, however, communal monasticism became the norm, as developed by Basil (in the East) and Benedict (in the West).
Monasticism is an extreme spirituality, a withdrawing from the world in order to radically engage with God – author Ernest Boyer, Jr. describes it as “life on the edge” and contrasts it with “life at the center” – the life that all of us lead: a life involving work, family, volunteer work, commitments, schedules, and ongoing engagement with the world. Sometimes, those of us who live life at the center have a yearning for life at the edge – it seems simpler somehow. And some of us take time each day for “quiet time” and maybe even time to time escape for some kind of retreat. Some of the women from our church will be gathering with other women in the Presbytery for a retreat next Friday and Saturday. Those times away are wonderful, but most days, many of us (including most clergy I know) struggle to find any substantive quiet time in our usual routines. We have a hard time making it out to the desert. Beyond the logistical issues, life in the desert, monastic life has its own challenges. Boyer further describes these challenges, writing “It is a life of total vulnerability. To surrender fully to that longing for transformation is to be willing to relinquish all that you are in order to become all that you can become.”
Of course, sometimes life takes us to the desert, to that vulnerability, in ways that are far less welcome: we find ourselves suffering – with chronic pain, with a frightening diagnosis, with a disintegrating relationship, with mental illness, with an economic crisis – and suddenly we are on the edge, grappling with vulnerability, and feeling (often) very much alone. There is certainly a sense in which all suffering is solitary – but there is another sense in which all suffering is shared. Most people have undergone some experience of suffering – so that someone who has lost a very dear friend, probably has some sense of what another person who has lost a loved one is likely to be experiencing; those who have suffered with chronic knee pain can surely empathize with someone who has ongoing back pain; at some level the loneliness of a relationship ending can be similar to the loneliness of a job loss. And while each of us can find some comfort in the companionship of others during these times of extremes, there is also a sense in which, as the choir sang, we have to go and stand our trials by ourselves. And it is there, where we are alone, that we meet God in the desert. And we find that, harsh as the desert is, there really are streams in the desert – God is caring for us, even there.
And like Elijah, who ran away to the desert when King Ahab and Queen Jezebel were threatening him with death, we may find God in the silence then – in those times of prayer, of journaling, of meditation. Just as the Hebrew people with Moses looked out in the desert in the night and saw the fiery pillar and realized that God was with them, so too might any of us look to God at those extreme times, when we find ourselves alone or vulnerable in ways that feel extreme to us.
Indeed, suffering is one of the times that draws us into the heart of God, much as the contemplative approach does. So whether we seek the desert or find ourselves thrust there, the solitude, silence, and vulnerability render us more open to God, and indeed, more hungry for God, than when life is going well, or when we are busy at the center of life.
But life at the center is hallowed, too. Indeed, all of the prophets, priests, and kings of the Bible are remembered for what they did in their comings and goings not their being still, their speaking not their silence, their being with others not their solitude – in what Boyer calls “life at the center”. They served God downtown more than in the desert.
All of you have heard me talk about the contemplative dimension of life, and I think, upon reflection, that I have provided an imbalanced vision of spirituality. To be sure, there is a place in life for the desert disciplines of stillness, silence and solitude, but for most of us these are rare moments, and for some of us, the contemplative tradition feels foreign and fruitless. We don’t like stillness, in silence we hear only our own loud thoughts, and solitude makes us nervous. Combining the three doesn’t make them more palatable. Now, as an aside, I would love to help each person find their way to some time in the contemplative tradition – much as the art teacher would love to help the confirmed non-artist find their creative side. There are ways that people can learn contemplation, but not everyone wants to, and let me say clearly that it’s not the only way to experience God. I should also state clearly that when I talk about the contemplative dimension, one could also say the transcendent dimension, or the spiritual mind – I’m trying to describe that sense of connection to God and to life beyond ourselves, in the community and the world, which is essential to the spiritual life. Life in God is not a solitary enterprise – even though some people find solitude to be an important pathway to connecting with God and the world. Relationality is the essential component of life in God – we recognize our essential relatedness. We are in relationship with God and with others and with the world.
And it is certainly possible to come to a deep sense of that without going to the desert.
As some of you may remember, I have found the insights of a Franciscan priest, Father Richard Rohr, to be helpful. Rohr’s most recent book is called The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See. Yesterday he gave a talk via webcast on the internet, and I was able to see it. The talk was very interesting – Rohr is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and speaks of the connections between action and contemplation. He describes the goal of contemplation to be the development of what he calls “non-dual thinking – a way of thinking that is not so much analytical as transcendent: it is more about the essential connections between things than the distinctions between things. And in his talk he had spent some time on why both modes of thinking were important. And as he usually does, he spoke about the importance of contemplation, as a path to this kind of non-dualistic thinking. After the talk, there was some time for questions and answers, so I typed in my question. And I was so delighted to hear the moderator say when it was almost done, “We have time for one more question, from Susan Zencka of Stevens Point, WI.” My question was about those people who are not drawn to contemplation. I asked: what about active spirituality? Is there a path to experiencing God that is not contemplative? I knew that many others had written about this, but I wanted to hear Rohr’s perspective, because he writes so compellingly about contemplation.
I was delighted with his answer – he said, “Absolutely.” In fact, there are many people who are active, and who are not well-suited to the contemplative tradition, because of their active minds and restless energy. He in fact said that he had been told early on that because of his personality, “Sitting meditation is something you can do, but it will always be a stretch – you might be better off with walking meditation…” and then he continued, adding “You don’t need to become a Buddhist zen practitioner to become a non dual thinker, but you DO need to practice deep love and deep suffering.” He explained that deep love creates a vulnerability in which we give ourselves to others, and in deep suffering we give up control. He reminded us that most people will not take up meditation, and that there are other ways to develop the spiritual mind, which he calls non-dual thinking. He spoke of how we in the West suffer from NDD, nature deficit disorder, and that by spending time in the natural world regularly, and letting the trees, birds, and rivers speak to us, we can come to the contemplative mind. “Let animals, nature, the sun, the moon and stars convert you,” he concluded.
Well, well, well. I was really excited about this yesterday, because my sermon was already going to be about different ways of coming to spirituality, and how the active life can also be a path to experiencing God. A couple of years ago, I started reading Parker Palmer’s The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring and had been very impressed with Palmer’s analysis of this same issue. He writes: “Contemplation and action ought not to be at war with one another, and as long as they are, we will be at war within ourselves…contemplation and action are not contradictions, but poles of a great paradox that can and must be held together ….Contemplation and action are not high skills or specialties for the virtuoso few. They are the warp and weft of human life, the interwoven threads that form the fabric of who we are and who we are becoming.”
And this is the point that Ernest Boyer, Jr. makes in his book about life at the center and life at the edges. The book is titled Finding God at Home: Family Life as Spiritual Discipline. In it, Boyer describes how caring for one another can be sacrament, that the routines of life can be liturgy – an echo of Parker Palmer’s discussions of work, creativity and caring.
Spirituality lies in how we approach what we do. If we, in our busy lives, care for others as a way to serve God, paying attention to people in the same focused, grateful way we might contemplate a sunset, we can experience God while living at the center. If we in our faithful lives, pray as a way to make ourselves feel better, and do the tasks of faith with self-righteousness or resentment, then we might miss God because our devotion is really aimed at ourselves.
We are all different, and just as I believe that God didn’t create so much variety within human experience only to expect us all to come to God in the same religious tradition, so have I come to believe that as different folks, God doesn’t only connect with Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Baha’i and the rest of humankind through the one practice of silence and contemplation. The desert may be a large portion of the earth, but life contains a number of habitats, and just as some of us live in the woods, while others live in the desert; so too, some of us experience God through contemplation, and others through a more active engagement with God – and many of us find richness in trying different ways of praying, different ways of reflecting, different paths in knowing God and ourselves in God. While the desert may be a rich and wonderful place of prayer for some, it’s inhospitable for others. But if we find ourselves there, unexpectedly, let’s be open to the gifts and abundant life that lie even within its extremes. And for those of us who find ourselves more at home downtown, there may be room in our days for moments in the desert – a candle lit a the table, a bowl of rocks to remind us of the natural world, an opportunity between commitments for 5 minutes of silence and rest. In the spirit of non-dual thinking, our lives don’t have to be either-or; we can enjoy the busyness and engagement of life at the center, while finding moments to take ourselves to the edge. Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote a book on meditation called Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Indeed, wherever we go, there we are, and if we can begin to be present to where we are, we will be on the way to finding life at the edge, right at the center. And so indeed we will find all things working for good… and that nothing, not heights, nor depths, neither silence nor noise, neither busyness nor stillness nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Amen.