Travels and Travails
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday July 21, 2002
***
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
For as long as I can remember, and certainly for as long as I have been a Unitarian minister, there’s been a popular newsletter column which tends to make the rounds of our churches this time of year. Perhaps some of you have even seen and read it yourselves; it was originally written by my friend Patrick O’Neill when he was the minister of our church in Kirkland, Washington, although now it’s been tweaked so often that it has really become part of the public domain, and it’s called “Why Unitarian Universalist Churches Close in the Summer.” The column is basically a list of a dozen or so tongue-in-cheek explanations for this curious phenomenon, and my personal favorite was always: Unitarian Universalist churches close in the summer because all UU ministers are either working toward advanced degrees, or else working a second job (typically driving an Ice Cream truck) in order to pay off their student loans from the last one. And nowadays the column often ends with a twist (which was not part of Patrick’s original text) which goes something like this: “Surprise! Our church continues to meet all summer long even though there is no Sunday School and the minister is on vacation, so please show up and bring your friends.”
Now as an historian, who already has several advanced degrees (and, thankfully, relatively modest student loans), I know the REAL reason why Unitarian Churches used to close in the summer, and likewise have my theories about why more and more of them are continuing to operate year-round today. In the first instance, it had to do with the important theological discovery, early in the 19th century, that here in New England in July and August, God goes to Maine. Or the Cape or the Vineyard (rumor has it that she was even spotted recently here on Nantucket) -- anywhere, basically, other than “the Neighborhood of Boston,” where the weather becomes so oppressively hot this time of year that only a denomination that believes in a literal Hell could actually worship there.
The reasons that the tradition is beginning to change are slightly more complicated. It may reflect the changing demographics of our movement: Unitarian Universalism is no longer exclusively a New England-based religion, while folks who have come into our tradition from some other religious background (something in the neighborhood of 90% of us) are more accustomed to worshipping year-round. It may be as simple as the widespread proliferation of effective air conditioning. Or it may have something to do with the possibility that, in a denomination where a good many people no longer believe in a traditional God anyway, it really doesn’t matter WHERE she spends the summer.
One counter-cyclical factor, however, which has contributed to the persistence of this tradition in many of our congregations of closing down for the summer, is the fact that many of our clergy, myself included, have grown accustomed to having a two-month hiatus in our customary duties between the conclusion of the General Assembly and the first Sunday after Labor Day, and are understandably reluctant to give it up without compelling cause. It just seems like the natural, God-given order of things: we start out like gangbusters in the Autumn, cautiously feel our way through the traditional holiday seasons, scramble like mad to come up with something meaningful to say after Easter, and then in the summer we finally get a chance to get caught up with our reading, so that we can begin the process all over again with a fresh crop of good ideas for the fall. It’s not that we actually take the whole summer off. It’s just that the rhythm of our work routine changes: fewer committee meetings or Saturdays spent sitting in front of the word processor; more weekend weddings, and weekdays devoted to whittling away at the big stack of books we’ve been accumulating all winter.
Of course, I’m speaking now of my colleagues on the mainland. Here on Nantucket, so far as I can tell, Unitarianism has always been a year-round religion; Nantucketers have never felt the need to go sailing off in search of a more congenial climate in which to worship. In search of whales, yes...but never God. Here on Nantucket, the Sacred somehow seems near at hand; we live, if not in Paradise, than at least in a close approximation of it. People travel here from around the globe in search of rest and re-creation, a momentary Sabbath of the Soul which renews their spirits and puts them more closely in touch with the creative energies that give us life and give life meaning. Our “faraway island” is a traveler’s paradise, where the golden dome of this church towers above the harbor as a symbolic beacon to those who arrive here seeking something that often seems elusive in less-idyllic locations.
The word “travel” comes from the French word “travailler” which means “to work” or “to labor,” and which has also come into the English language in the form of the word “travail,” meaning approximately the same thing. All three words trace their roots back to an original Latin word meaning “torture” -- suggesting that even at its best, travel is often hard work, while at its worst it can be torturous, as anyone who has recently tried to pass through a security checkpoint at Logan airport might readily attest. Those who travel frequently on business rapidly discover little ways to ease the tedium of the journey -- personal techniques for avoiding or circumventing the travails of life on the road; while people who travel primarily for pleasure, to escape the “busy-ness” of their ordinary lives, must learn to develop a somewhat different set of skills and attitudes.
Although it’s been said so often it is essentially a cliché, the real secret to traveling for pleasure is to recognize that the quality of the journey is as important as the destination. It’s not just a matter of moving efficiently from Point A to Point B. It’s about what you see, and who you meet, and how you feel about it both while it’s happening and after it’s all over. Traveling for pleasure should never be an ordeal to be endured, it should be an experience to be savored. And sometimes that means slowing down, and being patient, and learned to be delighted when something surprises you, rather than becoming annoyed, or even angry, when things don’t go quite the way you’d planned.
I also sometimes hear the term “traveler” contrasted with the word “tourist,” as if the latter were some sort of inferior specimen of the species, universally despised by those who are authentic connoisseurs of the art of travel. It’s an unfair stereotype, frankly, yet one with which we are all undoubtedly familiar: the loud, overbearing, obnoxious tourist who moves through a landscape without ever allowing themselves to be moved by it, unimpressed by what they see, critical of the unfamiliar, complaining about anything and everything that isn’t just exactly the way it is at home. Sometimes you have to wonder why they even bother to travel at all.
And yet, on some level at least, we are all essentially just tourists on this planet: plopped down in the midst of an unfamiliar landscape, surrounded by strangers whose language and customs we don’t fully understand, dependent upon the hospitality of others for our very survival. But in time we learn to make ourselves at home, perhaps even acquiring a few snapshots and souvenirs in the process. A “tour” is simply a circuit or a “turn” -- one can tour with a band, or serve a tour of duty in a hostile land, one can even exhibit a “tour de force” -- a “grand feat of skill, strength or ingenuity.” Yet when our turn is up and our circuit is complete, we have either been transformed by our excursion or we have not.
Or in the words of travel writer Joe Robinson, formerly the editor of Escape magazine, the real adventure of travel “isn’t about boldly going where no [one] has gone before; it’s about going where you’ve never been....about the vast landscape of incognita territory within each of us, revealed through the magic of the journey....The call of the road is really about indulging our urge to know the world and, through it, our place in it.” [Utne Reader, July/August 2001]
There is yet another kind of traveler in addition to the business traveler or the recreational tourist, and this is the religious pilgrim. Business travelers travel because travel is part of their job; Tourists travel in order to see new sights and meet new people, to experience different cultures, and perhaps acquire a few souvenirs. But a pilgrim travels in order to seek God, and to stand in closer proximity to the sacred. A pilgrimage is a journey of self-discovery through an encounter with the Holy; a pilgrim submits to the discipline of travel in order to acquire the wisdom of the traveler, to find their true home by leaving their old one behind. A pilgrim is truly a stranger, a sojourner in a foreign land.
Pilgrims forsake the familiar in order to become familiar with that which is ultimately mysterious and unknown, and by doing so they hope to discover an essential truth about themselves and their place in the universe. All pilgrims are travelers, but not all travelers are pilgrims...and not all pilgrims travel vast distances upon the earth. Henry David Thoreau, for example, considered himself “widely traveled in Concord,” and Walden Pond is now a site visited by pilgrims from every corner of the planet. Pilgrims saunter upon the sante terre -- the sacred earth -- seeking insight through their travails. For the pilgrim, the journey and the destination truly become one -- and Truth is discovered in the moment of their meeting.
Of course, one cannot speak sensibly of travel without talking also about the other side of the experience, which is the provision of hospitality. The Scripture reminds us to “be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” [Hebrews 13:2] I was a little surprised to discover in the course of my etymological research that the word “hospitality” not only contains the word “hospital” -- a place of care and healing -- but is also related to the word “hostility,” as well as host and hostess, hospice, and the homonyms “hostel” and “hostile.” It may strike you as ironic that “hostility” and “hospitality” are such close linguistic cousins, but a body can host a parasite as well as a guest, entertain...well, let’s say idiots...as easily as angels. The challenge of hospitality is to treat EVERY stranger as though they were a guest and an angel...welcome visitors to our home, who may very well be bearing a very important message for us...regardless of how we may be feeling about them at the time.
And this is true not only for those of us on the Island who work within the “hospitality industry.” It is a fundamental obligation for all those who consider themselves “people of faith.” The core mission of this church, and to my mind every community of faith, is to provide what I call a “ministry of hospitality”-- to be a place of care and healing to the strangers among us, and through our efforts, to transform them, even “convert” them if you will, into our friends. Not by changing them into someone they are not. But by learning to accept them, just as we find them, and by sharing authentically of ourselves. And through that one simple act of hospitality, we begin the process of discovering the things we have in common, and which unite us as members of the human family.
I know this is not always an easy thing to do. From childhood we are taught to be suspicious of strangers, and also to be suspicious of hospitality -- of strangers bearing candy. Just think for a moment about the story of Odysseus -- perhaps the world’s first adventure travel narrative -- it begins with the tale of the Trojan Horse, an elaborate ruse involving a gift bearing Greeks, and concludes with Odysseus disguised as a stranger within his own home, and his brutal revenge against those who have abused the hospitality of his household. So these prejudices are deeply-rooted within the so-called wisdom of our culture. But there is another kind of wisdom -- the wisdom of the Pilgrim, or the Good Samaritan -- who encounters a fellow-traveler upon the road, and stops to offer hospitality in a time of crisis to someone desperately in need of a friend. Let this be the wisdom that we aspire to in our personal pilgrimages of faith. And may our good example prove an inspiration to both our neighbors, and to the strangers who sojourn among us.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday July 21, 2002
***
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
For as long as I can remember, and certainly for as long as I have been a Unitarian minister, there’s been a popular newsletter column which tends to make the rounds of our churches this time of year. Perhaps some of you have even seen and read it yourselves; it was originally written by my friend Patrick O’Neill when he was the minister of our church in Kirkland, Washington, although now it’s been tweaked so often that it has really become part of the public domain, and it’s called “Why Unitarian Universalist Churches Close in the Summer.” The column is basically a list of a dozen or so tongue-in-cheek explanations for this curious phenomenon, and my personal favorite was always: Unitarian Universalist churches close in the summer because all UU ministers are either working toward advanced degrees, or else working a second job (typically driving an Ice Cream truck) in order to pay off their student loans from the last one. And nowadays the column often ends with a twist (which was not part of Patrick’s original text) which goes something like this: “Surprise! Our church continues to meet all summer long even though there is no Sunday School and the minister is on vacation, so please show up and bring your friends.”
Now as an historian, who already has several advanced degrees (and, thankfully, relatively modest student loans), I know the REAL reason why Unitarian Churches used to close in the summer, and likewise have my theories about why more and more of them are continuing to operate year-round today. In the first instance, it had to do with the important theological discovery, early in the 19th century, that here in New England in July and August, God goes to Maine. Or the Cape or the Vineyard (rumor has it that she was even spotted recently here on Nantucket) -- anywhere, basically, other than “the Neighborhood of Boston,” where the weather becomes so oppressively hot this time of year that only a denomination that believes in a literal Hell could actually worship there.
The reasons that the tradition is beginning to change are slightly more complicated. It may reflect the changing demographics of our movement: Unitarian Universalism is no longer exclusively a New England-based religion, while folks who have come into our tradition from some other religious background (something in the neighborhood of 90% of us) are more accustomed to worshipping year-round. It may be as simple as the widespread proliferation of effective air conditioning. Or it may have something to do with the possibility that, in a denomination where a good many people no longer believe in a traditional God anyway, it really doesn’t matter WHERE she spends the summer.
One counter-cyclical factor, however, which has contributed to the persistence of this tradition in many of our congregations of closing down for the summer, is the fact that many of our clergy, myself included, have grown accustomed to having a two-month hiatus in our customary duties between the conclusion of the General Assembly and the first Sunday after Labor Day, and are understandably reluctant to give it up without compelling cause. It just seems like the natural, God-given order of things: we start out like gangbusters in the Autumn, cautiously feel our way through the traditional holiday seasons, scramble like mad to come up with something meaningful to say after Easter, and then in the summer we finally get a chance to get caught up with our reading, so that we can begin the process all over again with a fresh crop of good ideas for the fall. It’s not that we actually take the whole summer off. It’s just that the rhythm of our work routine changes: fewer committee meetings or Saturdays spent sitting in front of the word processor; more weekend weddings, and weekdays devoted to whittling away at the big stack of books we’ve been accumulating all winter.
Of course, I’m speaking now of my colleagues on the mainland. Here on Nantucket, so far as I can tell, Unitarianism has always been a year-round religion; Nantucketers have never felt the need to go sailing off in search of a more congenial climate in which to worship. In search of whales, yes...but never God. Here on Nantucket, the Sacred somehow seems near at hand; we live, if not in Paradise, than at least in a close approximation of it. People travel here from around the globe in search of rest and re-creation, a momentary Sabbath of the Soul which renews their spirits and puts them more closely in touch with the creative energies that give us life and give life meaning. Our “faraway island” is a traveler’s paradise, where the golden dome of this church towers above the harbor as a symbolic beacon to those who arrive here seeking something that often seems elusive in less-idyllic locations.
The word “travel” comes from the French word “travailler” which means “to work” or “to labor,” and which has also come into the English language in the form of the word “travail,” meaning approximately the same thing. All three words trace their roots back to an original Latin word meaning “torture” -- suggesting that even at its best, travel is often hard work, while at its worst it can be torturous, as anyone who has recently tried to pass through a security checkpoint at Logan airport might readily attest. Those who travel frequently on business rapidly discover little ways to ease the tedium of the journey -- personal techniques for avoiding or circumventing the travails of life on the road; while people who travel primarily for pleasure, to escape the “busy-ness” of their ordinary lives, must learn to develop a somewhat different set of skills and attitudes.
Although it’s been said so often it is essentially a cliché, the real secret to traveling for pleasure is to recognize that the quality of the journey is as important as the destination. It’s not just a matter of moving efficiently from Point A to Point B. It’s about what you see, and who you meet, and how you feel about it both while it’s happening and after it’s all over. Traveling for pleasure should never be an ordeal to be endured, it should be an experience to be savored. And sometimes that means slowing down, and being patient, and learned to be delighted when something surprises you, rather than becoming annoyed, or even angry, when things don’t go quite the way you’d planned.
I also sometimes hear the term “traveler” contrasted with the word “tourist,” as if the latter were some sort of inferior specimen of the species, universally despised by those who are authentic connoisseurs of the art of travel. It’s an unfair stereotype, frankly, yet one with which we are all undoubtedly familiar: the loud, overbearing, obnoxious tourist who moves through a landscape without ever allowing themselves to be moved by it, unimpressed by what they see, critical of the unfamiliar, complaining about anything and everything that isn’t just exactly the way it is at home. Sometimes you have to wonder why they even bother to travel at all.
And yet, on some level at least, we are all essentially just tourists on this planet: plopped down in the midst of an unfamiliar landscape, surrounded by strangers whose language and customs we don’t fully understand, dependent upon the hospitality of others for our very survival. But in time we learn to make ourselves at home, perhaps even acquiring a few snapshots and souvenirs in the process. A “tour” is simply a circuit or a “turn” -- one can tour with a band, or serve a tour of duty in a hostile land, one can even exhibit a “tour de force” -- a “grand feat of skill, strength or ingenuity.” Yet when our turn is up and our circuit is complete, we have either been transformed by our excursion or we have not.
Or in the words of travel writer Joe Robinson, formerly the editor of Escape magazine, the real adventure of travel “isn’t about boldly going where no [one] has gone before; it’s about going where you’ve never been....about the vast landscape of incognita territory within each of us, revealed through the magic of the journey....The call of the road is really about indulging our urge to know the world and, through it, our place in it.” [Utne Reader, July/August 2001]
There is yet another kind of traveler in addition to the business traveler or the recreational tourist, and this is the religious pilgrim. Business travelers travel because travel is part of their job; Tourists travel in order to see new sights and meet new people, to experience different cultures, and perhaps acquire a few souvenirs. But a pilgrim travels in order to seek God, and to stand in closer proximity to the sacred. A pilgrimage is a journey of self-discovery through an encounter with the Holy; a pilgrim submits to the discipline of travel in order to acquire the wisdom of the traveler, to find their true home by leaving their old one behind. A pilgrim is truly a stranger, a sojourner in a foreign land.
Pilgrims forsake the familiar in order to become familiar with that which is ultimately mysterious and unknown, and by doing so they hope to discover an essential truth about themselves and their place in the universe. All pilgrims are travelers, but not all travelers are pilgrims...and not all pilgrims travel vast distances upon the earth. Henry David Thoreau, for example, considered himself “widely traveled in Concord,” and Walden Pond is now a site visited by pilgrims from every corner of the planet. Pilgrims saunter upon the sante terre -- the sacred earth -- seeking insight through their travails. For the pilgrim, the journey and the destination truly become one -- and Truth is discovered in the moment of their meeting.
Of course, one cannot speak sensibly of travel without talking also about the other side of the experience, which is the provision of hospitality. The Scripture reminds us to “be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” [Hebrews 13:2] I was a little surprised to discover in the course of my etymological research that the word “hospitality” not only contains the word “hospital” -- a place of care and healing -- but is also related to the word “hostility,” as well as host and hostess, hospice, and the homonyms “hostel” and “hostile.” It may strike you as ironic that “hostility” and “hospitality” are such close linguistic cousins, but a body can host a parasite as well as a guest, entertain...well, let’s say idiots...as easily as angels. The challenge of hospitality is to treat EVERY stranger as though they were a guest and an angel...welcome visitors to our home, who may very well be bearing a very important message for us...regardless of how we may be feeling about them at the time.
And this is true not only for those of us on the Island who work within the “hospitality industry.” It is a fundamental obligation for all those who consider themselves “people of faith.” The core mission of this church, and to my mind every community of faith, is to provide what I call a “ministry of hospitality”-- to be a place of care and healing to the strangers among us, and through our efforts, to transform them, even “convert” them if you will, into our friends. Not by changing them into someone they are not. But by learning to accept them, just as we find them, and by sharing authentically of ourselves. And through that one simple act of hospitality, we begin the process of discovering the things we have in common, and which unite us as members of the human family.
I know this is not always an easy thing to do. From childhood we are taught to be suspicious of strangers, and also to be suspicious of hospitality -- of strangers bearing candy. Just think for a moment about the story of Odysseus -- perhaps the world’s first adventure travel narrative -- it begins with the tale of the Trojan Horse, an elaborate ruse involving a gift bearing Greeks, and concludes with Odysseus disguised as a stranger within his own home, and his brutal revenge against those who have abused the hospitality of his household. So these prejudices are deeply-rooted within the so-called wisdom of our culture. But there is another kind of wisdom -- the wisdom of the Pilgrim, or the Good Samaritan -- who encounters a fellow-traveler upon the road, and stops to offer hospitality in a time of crisis to someone desperately in need of a friend. Let this be the wisdom that we aspire to in our personal pilgrimages of faith. And may our good example prove an inspiration to both our neighbors, and to the strangers who sojourn among us.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 11:09 AM
