Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, February 27, 2022.

I have a question for you. Do you like being lost? Do you like that feeling of not knowing where you are, or where you’re going? Does anyone?

Well, neither do I. I can get aggravated when something goes wrong and the maps app or GPS leads me astray. I don’t even like to stop and ask for directions! And I wonder if, in recent years, our dependence on technology hasn’t helped—are we losing our innate sense of direction, our natural ability to find our way?

I’m not just talking about finding your way from one physical place to another. I’m more interested in exploring the ways we travel in our awareness, our understanding, the ways we imagine our selves, our companions, our world. How we make meaning, whether we can be openhearted and hopeful, especially in the face of hardship and suffering, vulnerability and dislocation.

I don’t like being lost. But that, my spiritual companions, is what I am going to recommend to you today. That you, that we, start learning how to embrace and welcome being lost; that we begin to imagine that getting lost might be a necessary and vital part of the way of vocation.

Last week I told you about how my call to go off to seminary felt like it was going to turn my life upside down. How I resisted it, and tried to run away from it. In those days one of the people I could talk to was my minister, whose name was Will. I remember one day, sitting in Will’s office, and when he asked how I was doing, I said, “I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a dark wood. I’m feeling called to go in there, but a big part of me doesn’t want to. Because I’m afraid I’m going to get lost in there. Who knows where it leads? Maybe I’ll never find my way out.”

I didn’t want to get lost. I was afraid of what I couldn’t yet see or imagine. But at some point, with the help and encouragement of companions like Will, and others, I started taking little steps into what felt like a dark wood. And it turned out okay. It was less scary than I thought it would be. Parts of it were even fun! And eventually it let me to you.

We have been on this pandemic pilgrimage for almost two years now, with all its ups and downs; so much uncertainty, so much to worry about and be afraid of. Who among us hasn’t felt lost, at least some times, over these many months? I know you’re tired, you want to know when it’s going to end, when things are going to be normal again. I want that too. It’s like we’ve been traveling without a map, and I’d like to have a sense of where we are, and how far it is to our destination. When are we going to get there?

But another part of me is starting to sense an invitation in this pilgrimage that none of us wanted or sought. Maybe there’s a lesson here, especially for those of us who like to think we’re in control of our destiny, who want to know how things are going to turn out. What if this pandemic is teaching us to embrace this sense of being lost; inviting us to learn how to be more open to uncertainty, and even to embrace it?

A few weeks ago we sang along with a community choir to the great hymn, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” That version has a verse that isn’t in our hymnal, that goes,

I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin;
   I see the blue above it;
  And day by day this pathway smooths,
   Since first I learned to love it…

Isn’t this a beautiful invitation, to learn to love this path we are on? Even and especially to learn to love its twists and turns and uncertainties? To be lifting our eyes, to be looking up, and around, finding our way step by step and day by day. It’s heartening, isn’t it, to be reminded that the attitude and perspective we bring to the journey has a direct bearing on how we experience it? “And day by day this pathway smooths, since first I learned to love it.”

We can’t get out of this path we are on, so what if we tried learning to love it? Rather than worrying about where or when it’s going to end, what if we just paid more attention to what is right here, right now, and what is just ahead? Not looking too far down the road.

Some years ago I was talking with my friend Curtis, who’s a monk, and I was wondering about things, seeking some answers—I can still picture the place we were standing when we had that conversation, when he quoted some words from Rilke that I’d never heard before. They are part of Rilke’s “Letter to a Young Poet,” and hold some real wisdom for the living of these days:

“I want to beg you, as much as I can… to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

It seems to me that getting lost is an integral part of the way of vocation. When you hear a calling, and try to follow where it leads, you are going to lose track of your old self, at least for a while, you may need to let go some some things you hold dear, as Parker Palmer says, you are going to find yourself unable to explain or understand what this is about, but still be sensing, “This is something I can't not do.”

Teilhard de Chardin’s words about trusting the slow work of God come to mind:

“We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.”

What if we could embrace these stages of instability, of being in process, of being lost? Could it be that this lostness is a necessary ingredient, a needed step, in the journey of becoming, of finding our way?

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

I was talking with my spiritual director the other day, and he said, “You don’t get resurrection without something dying.” Are there things we need to let die, old habits, parts of ourselves that no longer serve us, ideas that are holding us back—so we can have new life?

This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent, the forty days that lead to Easter. In some traditions, it’s customary to give up something for Lent; to make a practice of self-denial. But I’m wondering, is there something I might give up, not to be punitive, but because it’s holding me back from a freer, more abundant life? Is there something that’s keeping you from saying yes to the calling that is your own, something you might want to give up to let go of, in this season?

Being a person of faith is to be someone who is searching and seeking, yes? It is to be someone looking up, and looking around, reaching out, and also exploring within. Our reading this morning came from a novel by Ursula LeGuin; she wrote these lines to a group of people in the novel she calls The Finders, who leave their home and go elsewhere, when most people stay put. The poem Bo read this morning is her song to these people who leave, who risk getting lost, who are looking for something.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

Isn’t this what we are made for? Isn’t this the invitation of being human? Isn’t it the particular invitation of being a person of faith? To embrace what is unknown and unfamiliar, to be opening one’s self and diving as deeply into life as we can? To be trusting that we are part of a great and abiding rhythm of holding on and letting go, of being lost and being found. That it involves pain and suffering, and joy and connection. And in it all we are held by a mysterious and abiding Presence that will never let us go.

I once was lost, but now am found, we sing. Let’s not be afraid of getting lost, my friends. Because sometimes that’s how we will find a new way home. May we be people learning how to love this way of joy and sorrow; being lost and being found, finding new ways, always coming home.

Amen.