The Places That Make Us Whole

“Tell me the landscape in which you live,
and I will tell you who you are.”
—Jose Ortega Gassett

I believe that certain places call to us.  I believe that certain places reach out beyond time and space to touch our heart.  I believe that certain places pull us, gently, into their earthly embrace. 

Desert, ocean, wilderness, lake, mountain top, our own backyard, a hidden forest path, a beloved college or university, a home town, a vibrant city, even a church—this church—there are places in this world that make us whole.

Author and shaman Oriah Mountain Dreamer writes: “I don’t know why different places on earth speak specifically to different people. I do not know why, but I do believe that for each of us there is at least one place on the earth where our hearts and our bodies are mended and renewed.  We need to find and go to these places.  We are all lost without this sense of home.”  The Dance, P. 114-15

I found my place fourteen years ago. I found it in the desert of New Mexico.  I remember the day when I knew I had found the place that could make me feel whole. 

It was quite chilly as dawn was breaking, the first hint of sun shedding light on the highway springing out of the darkness in front of us.  I wasn’t in my car.  I was crammed into a creaky truck with four other people I had just met.  Two were sleeping, snoring, and making sloppy sniffling sounds in the shadows.  But I was awake, anxious for something, looking out beyond the half open window.   I was new to New Mexico, this land of open spaces and clear vision. I’m not sure why, but this land had called to me, somehow reaching out from her rocky crevices, reaching across the flat plains of Oklahoma, over the banks of the Mississippi, through Pennsylvania farmlands, up the East coast and into the traffic saturated streets of Boston.  Across 1400 miles, I heard her call.

What is it about a place that calls to us, speaks to us?  What is it within us that craves, as Jack London would say, the call of the wild?  What are we looking for?

Unitarian Henry David Thoreau wrote famously of what called to him when he set out for the forest around Walden Pond: “I went  . . . because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.”

Is it fear, then, that drives us to these places, the fear that we have not yet learned how to live? Is there some part of us that knows we have forgotten some essential connection?

I had gone to New Mexico prepared to discover the splendor of her landscape.  I was hungry for some heavy hiking deep into her mysterious heart.  Wanting to be safe in my explorations, and not risk injuring myself hiking alone, I teamed up with some other members of the Sierra Club.  That’s why I was with those strangers in the truck.  That day, we were off for a long hike several hours west of Santa Fe.  As the sun continued to rise higher in the sky, we sped along miles of barren landscape.  Staring at the emptiness, I thought of something Kathleen Norris once wrote: empty space “is a painful reminder of human limits, just as cities and shopping malls are attempts to deny them.”  Speaking of human limits, and escaping them, an old James Taylor song began playing on the radio, a song about a place, a song about finding sanctuary.  The four of us in the truck started singing along: 

When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof it's peaceful as can be
And there the world below can't bother me
Up on the roof.

Those words of stairs and roofs were more prophetic then we might ever have imagined.  After hours of hard hiking, and a tough climb up natural stairway of rocks and ledges, we found ourselves up on nature’s roof, a high New Mexico mesa, flat, endless, a resting place for ancient gods and modern day seekers.  There, in front of us, was what we had come to find: the ancient ruins of the Anasazi Indians.  This had been their home, their place, where they learned to live in harmony with the sun, the wind, the rain, and the fire of life.  Could we learn these same secrets here?  As we walked into the ruined village of this prehistoric people, we realized we were not alone.  There were three figures standing in front of us.  Could the spirits of the ancient Anasazi?  Could they be descendants of the first inhabitants?  I looked, and then I started to smile, in disbelief.  Standing there, in the midst of ancient stairways and broken roofs, was none other than James Taylor, himself. Honest to God!  Here in this land where past and present soulfully mixed, was the man whose song reminds us all that we need to find places we can call home:

Let me tell you now
When I come home feeling tired and beat
I go up where the air is fresh and sweet
I get away from the hustling crowds
And all that rat race noise down in the street
On the roof’s the only place I know
Where you just have to wish to make it so
Up on the roof.

What happens to us in those special places, whether it is a rooftop in New York City, a mesa top amidst the tumbleweed, or a quiet church sanctuary with an ivy covered window?  What happens to our perception, to how we take in the world and ourselves? 

Writer Mark Epstein wrestled with these very questions during a several walks he took in a winter-filled forest.  He writes:

The first day I found myself in the middle of a frozen lake with a windstorm swirling the snow in circles around me.  The second day I was halfway up a hill looking up at the sky the instant that the first flakes of a new snowfall came fluttering down in slow motion on to my upturned face.  The next day I was standing silently in the middle of a completely still forest when, with a sudden whoosh, an owl swooped low over my head with one huge dark wing extended.

I began to think there was something awesome about my timing.  How was it that, at the exact moment of my stopping, such incredible things were happening?  It took me longer than I am prepared to admit to realize that such things were always happening.  It was only that I was finally paying attention (p. 172-73, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, Mark Epstein, M.D.)

And isn’t that what happens in our sanctuaries, our sacred places?  Doesn’t something cause us to pay attention?  Don’t we stop, if but for a second?  Don’t we become still, if but for a moment?  Don’t we pause?

In that pause,  something beyond us reaches out and breaks through the membrane of our day-to-day.  It could be the sight of the nighttime skyline as we sit up on the roof.  It could be the limitless sky, broken only by the shadow of a golden eagle.  It could be the smell of the afternoon air as the first drops of winter rain begin to fall.  It could be the lone wind weathered pine standing on the summit of a summer mountain.  It could be the sound of the surf, as the ocean surges in and out, in and out, in an eternal dance of touching and fleeing.  It could be the sound of an organ playing Bach, a choir singing Mozart, or the deep resonance of a Tibetan meditation bowl ushering in a time of silence and reflection.  But something, somehow, reaches through.  Something reaches through our worry, our anxiety, our over booked schedules, our uncertainty, our weariness, our sadness, our emptiness.  And then, a miracle happens.  Some knowing within us reaches back.  Through our eyes, through our ears, through our stillness, through our senses, through our heart, through our ache to feel natural again, we reach out to the beauty that is always around us.

Mark Epstein continues:“[In those moments] I completely let down my guard. Those moments of silent awareness . . . were precious because of how open and connected I felt . . I could reach beyond my personality into something more open.”  P. 172-3

Unitarian prophet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson knew about reaching into openness.  He knew certain places could awaken us.  In his essay, Nature, he writes:

“In [those places], we return to reason and faith.  There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair.  Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currency of the Universal Being circulates through me; I am part or parcel of God.  I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”

As someone once said to me, “When I am in the awesomeness of the mountains or when I am in the quiet of our sanctuary, I can see myself clearly.  I’m in it, but I’m not all of it.  And it is not the same without me.”

What truth she spoke.  We are in it, but we are not all of it.  And this place is not the same without us.  This place, this world, needs our hearts, our minds, and our hands.  There is great healing to be done, especially in this troubled time.  There is great work to be done, especially in this uncertain time.

In order to do so, we must first come to know the places that will make us whole, those places that will recharge us and help us remember what we have forgotten.  We must return to them often, be it this church, be it the ocean, be it the mountains, be it our own backyard.  We must regularly stop for a time at those places that will help make us whole, and then we must step forth and help make this world whole.

May wish, my prayer, is that we will remember there are places that recall us to our best selves again.  My wish, my prayer is that we will remember we must stop and listen to our own call of the wild.

And my wish, my prayer is that we will discover in a deeper way that this church community can also become a place to feel beauty and peace.

But we have to step into it.

James Taylor had to walk up those steps to find his sanctuary up on the roof; four early morning hikers had to walk hours to find the ancient sanctuary on a mesa top
And we need to move more fully into the living sanctuary of this church community.

If you are new to this church, the true spirit of connection and community waits for you beyond the Sunday morning service.  What called you here is more than a sermon and a song.  Join us and explore more fully what a church is really about by coming to coffee hour, joining a few others in an adult enrichment class or a movie night, risking to sign up for a pot luck dinner and say “Hi.” 

And for those of us who are not so new to the church, we need to remember that coffee hour or a pot luck can feel like the most barren wilderness if you don’t know anyone.  We need to make sure we talk more to new faces than our old friends…and invite the new faces into our circles of friendship.  We all need to step beyond what we already know.

If you’ve been here for awhile, also know there are so many places left to explore.  We need friendly faces willing to greet new visitors, usher on Sunday mornings, set up coffee hour, help plan upcoming adult enrichment classes.  We need a few people willing to join our fellowship team and plan fun social events, the very things that weave the bonds of friendship and community.  We need a few people willing to step forward and become part of our Caring and Sharing leadership team that looks after people who need a hand or a little hope.  Taking any of these steps will lead you into the true heartbeat of a spiritual community.

And we need a place, a space, big enough to hold us all.  If you haven’t noticed, our space here has gotten wee bit tight!  More people are being called to claim this church as their spiritual home.  But we need to expand the walls in the sanctuary to hold more people, we need to build a new fellowship hall that is open and accessible to all.  We need each of us, as we are willing and able, to help in every way possible to build the open space so that beauty and peace will await whoever needs to find sanctuary here.  As a people of faith, I believe it is our obligation to open up and offer to others what we have found and created here.  And that obligation includes the financial support to make this so.

I leave you with the words of Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein.  He tells of the beauty and peace he found in the winter wilds of Alaska.  But he could be writing about any place that calls to us, any sanctuary that help us be whole:

I had been so busy dealing with the day-to-day chores of handling my team that I had forgotten what it was that had brought me to this spot on earth.  But as I stood alone on the ice and looked over the peaks into the purple sky, I remembered.  The dark night erupted before me.  Waves of white-green light scrolled across the heavens.  It was the aurora borealis, the northern lights.  I had seen them before, years ago, but never from this perspective.  They seemed to be directly in front of me, hovering over the mountains.  Almost beckoning . . . . I swear I heard something that night.  Not with my ears, but with some other part of myself.  I watched the pulsations of light the way you watch panthers in the wild, with awe and amazement.  I knew then and there that I was in the presence of something untamed and untamable.  Transcendent and mysterious.  Something that warmed my blood and made my soul tremble with new life.  I’d found what I had come for.  (Niles Elliot Goldstein, God at the Edge, p. 153-54)

May it be so.  Blessed Be.  Amen.

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Tim Kutzmark