What To Bring and What to Leave Behind: How to Pack for a Religious Journey

A SERMON DELIVERED September 7, 2008 By REV. DR. PATRICK T. O’NEILL at the FIRST UNITARIAN Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY

In her book, Teaching A Stone To Talk, Annie Dillard reports a remarkable true story:

“In the year 1845, 138 officers and men under the command of Sir John Franklin embarked from England to find the Northwest Passage across the high Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean.  They sailed in two three-masted barques.  Each sailing vessel carried an auxiliary steam engine and a twelve-day supply of coal for the entire projected trip of two or three-years’ voyage.  Instead of additional coal, each ship made room for a 1200 volume library, a ‘hand-organ, playing 50 tunes,’ china place settings for officers and men, cut-glass wine goblets, and sterling silver flatware.

“The officers’ sterling silver knives, forks, and spoons were particularly interesting.  The silver was of ornate Victorian design, very heavy at the handles and richly patterned.  Engraved on the handles were the individual officers’ initials and family crests.  The expedition carried no special clothing for the Arctic, only the uniforms of Her Majesty’s Navy.

“The ships set out in high dudgeon, amid enormous glory and fanfare.  Two months later a British whaling captain met the two ships in Lancaster Sound; he reported to England on the high spirits of officers and men.  He was the last European to see any of them alive.”  (Teaching A Stone To Talk, Harper and Row, New York, 1982, p.24.)

Years later, groups of Inuits reported seeing various still-living or dead members of the Franklin Expedition.  In a place called Starvation Cove, 35 crew members were found where they had frozen to death pulling a small boat across the ice.  It seems that Captain Franklin himself died on board ship when the two vessels became frozen into the Arctic pack ice.  The remaining men decided to walk to help.

“They outfitted themselves from the ships’ stores for the journey,” writes Annie Dillard.  ”Their bodies were found with those supplies they had chosen to carry.  Accompanying one group of frozen bodies, for instance, were the place settings of sterling silver flatware with officers’ initials and family crests.  A search party found, on the ice far from the ships, a letter clip and a piece of the backgammon board which Lady Jane Franklin had given her husband as a parting gift.”

Another small boat was found 65 miles farther across the ice, where two men had dragged it.  With the men were some chocolate, some guns, some tea, and a great deal of table silver.  The officers were found in full uniform: trousers and jackets of “fine blue cloth, edged with silver braid, sleeves bearing five silver buttons each.  Blue greatcoats, with black silk neckerchiefs.” (Dillard, p.26)

That was the Franklin Expedition.

The European efforts to explore and conquer the Arctic and Antarctic regions in the 19th and early 20th centuries constitute one of the strangest and most tragic and most revealing chapters in civilized history.  If the tragedy of the Franklin Expedition of 1845 were unique or exceptional, that would be one story.  But, in fact, the Franklin Expedition was only one of many such foolhardy and disastrously conceived expeditions that set out for the Poles from England and America and other countries.

Elaborately provisioned ships would set out for the high latitudes.  Soon they would encounter the pack ice and equinoctial storms.  Ice coated the decks, the spars, and the rigging; the sea froze around the rudders, and finally fastened to the ships.  The crews died there, or they made it through the winter, or they set off on foot, dragging boats behind them.  Sometimes they went off to find the Pole, or sometimes they went off to find help.  They carried their supplies on sledges, which they “manhauled” on ropes fastened to shoulder harnesses.

Annie Dillard quotes Sir Robert Scott, who died in Antarctica, “When men reach a Pole unaided,” said Scott, “their journey has a fine conception, and the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.” (p.26)

A noble concept, perhaps, but a foolish one that cost many lives.  So long as the earliest explorers relied on European technologies and methods, and a European mindset of rugged “unaided” individualism, their expeditions were doomed.  Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who conquered the South Pole, traveled Inuit-style.  It was not until 1909 that Robert Peary and Matthew Henson gained the North Pole, in the company of four Inuit guides.  Throughout the Peary Expedition, the Inuit drove the dog teams, built igloos, and supplied seal and walrus clothing. (p.27)

Annie Dillard reminds us, “There is no such thing as a solitary Polar explorer, fine as the conception is.” (p.27)

On the Antarctic continent, there is a point called the “Pole of Relative Inaccessibility.”  This is the point of land farthest from salt water in any direction.  It was an irresistible magnet for explorers until it was reached.  Why?  What were they seeking in those hostile icy realms?  

To read their own accounts, left to us in sometimes elegant prose in their diaries, these explorers sought at the Poles something of the sublime.  It’s the idea of the Pole, as much as the physical place itself, that attracts the exploration.  They speak of the “cold sublimity,” the “simplicity” and the “purity” and “eternity” of the landscape at the Poles.  They went partly in search of the sublime, and, Dillard says, they found it in the only way the sublime is ever found here or there – “around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days.”  They found it as they “manhauled” their humanity to the Poles. (p.29)

And Annie Dillard suggests that as it is with the physical earth, so it is with the human spirit.  We are irresistibly drawn toward the spiritual “Pole of Relative Inaccessibility,” that point farthest from our understanding, that we call Truth and Meaning.

Human souls being what they are, we are perpetually drawn to the exploration, to the grand expeditions toward the unreachable.  Not everyone in equal measure, to be sure, but enough of us that we can recognize in those foolhardy adventurers a bit of ourselves, a bit of our own hunger for the unattainable, a bit of our own folly and absurdity perhaps.  A bit of our own sense of being lost at times in a hostile and icy world.

The Unitarian poet, Carl Nelson salutes explorers in a wonderful poem entitled, “But For These Fools,” in which he says,

“I am thankful for those
who lifted their eyes from the beaten path
and who yielded to the lure of snow-capped peaks
rising above the trackless forest.

I am thankful for the fools
who left the helping push of multitudes
and struggled on a solitary way

I am thankful for the heretics
who suffered censure, slander, and rebuke
to find their own paths
and to light their own lights.

But for these fools
I would still be but a brute
dimly conscious in the darkness of primeval forests.”

In Julius Caesar’s accounts of the Gallic Wars, he uses the Latin word, “impedimenta” to refer to the “excess baggage” that an army must carry along with it.  So often, Caesar acknowledges, what was thought to be essential at the beginning of a journey, turns out to be an impediment to the journey.  

The exploration of extreme territories, of course, does not allow for the luxury of excess baggage; such a journey can only be made with essentials.  When the British officers of the Franklin Expedition thought that they could not eat food except from sterling silver tableware, we are amazed at their fatal silliness.  Their supplies, appropriate for the Royal Navy Officers’ Clubs of London, were the ultimate absurdity in the killing ice of the Arctic.  Their heavy silver plate, so valuable in the safe climes of home, became an impediment to their own survival on their aborted treks through the blizzards and towards safety.

“Don’t you see?” we want to shout to them, “Don’t you see that you don’t need to carry all that, it won’t help you where you’re going – it has no value there.”  How far can one walk, carrying how much silver?  and the answer is, “Not far, and not much!”

This business of what to bring and what to leave behind, of what is essential and what is “impedimenta” on our personal spiritual journeys, has always interested me.  I meet so many people who find themselves in the Unitarian Universalist church wrestling with their religious past, not knowing sometimes what to keep and what to leave behind.

“Can I still believe in God?” they ask me, “and still maintain my credentials as a UU Liberal?” 

“Can I still celebrate the important elements of my Jewish heritage and culture, and still maintain my place in this wonderful Unitarian Universalist community?” 

Or, “The idea of a paternalistic hierarchical god no longer makes sense to me.  Can I let go of the god of my parents, say, and still be a religious person?”

Or, “What am I to do with the anger and bitterness I still carry from a repressed and oppressive religious upbringing?”

Or, “How am I do deal with the gap, the distance my religious choice creates between myself and the family of my upbringing?”

What shall I bring, and what shall I leave behind? 

I have tremendous empathy for these questions, and so do most of the people in this room, because no one is a Unitarian Universalist except by free choice.  We are here, all of us, because this is the church of our adult choosing, because this is where our religious journeys have brought us, this is where our personal explorations have found some locus, some grounding, and some encouragement to thrive.

But I’m going to tell you something that may surprise you.  I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist since I was 20 years old, and I still have to remind myself sometimes that what I bring to this church and what I leave behind is strictly my choice and my decision.  After almost 40 years as a Unitarian Universalist, that is still a radical liberation to me, still a surprise, and still the chief reason I love the UU church.

Forty years after I first visited a Unitarian church at the invitation of a friend, (“This church is different,” he told me, “I think you’ll like it.”) forty years later I still cannot adequately express my initial joy in finding a religious community that honored my personal beliefs, my own moral intelligence, and my own religious odyssey as the Unitarian Universalist church did.

I believe we all evolve as religious persons.  One’s life is a continuum, one pathway leading on to another. In my own story, I loved the Catholic Church of my childhood, and I am eternally grateful for the sound moral education I received there.  Whatever I now know of faith and hope and charity, of integrity and passion for justice and peace, of the value of prayer and aesthetic worship, I first learned from parents and teachers who were shaped by their Catholic faith.  But there came a time when I eventually parted ways with their church in my young adulthood, when my discomfort with the church’s teaching on matters such as birth control and abortion rights, equality for women, and hierarchical authority in all questions of morals led me out of Catholicism.

For some time after I left Catholicism, I despaired of ever finding another church where I could feel spiritually at home.  I still considered myself at the time to be a radical Christian, even though clearly my theology was gradually broadening to include non-Christian sources and ideas.  But I did not go on any grand theological search for the “perfect church” because I was frankly skeptical of the notion of church itself, doubtful that there existed anywhere the kind of religious community that I needed.

Imagine my delight in discovering how wrong I was, that there is in fact a church that welcomes wandering souls like me! 

I know that when I first came to a UU church I brought along a fair amount of excess spiritual baggage.  I brought a fair amount of skepticism and cynicism towards all things religious and churchly.  I brought more than a few questions about the efficacy of faith, about the existence of anything like a Higher Power, about the inherent goodness of humanity.  

I brought with me forty years ago a heart broken by grief at the early death of a good friend in Viet Nam.  And I brought the disappointment and anger of one who felt exiled in the church of his upbringing.  I brought more questions than I had answers to.  And at the same time I carried a strong resistance to any language or vocabulary that sounded even slightly religious.

And so imagine my relief – and my surprise – when I found in Unitarian Universalism a church that welcomed me with all that unnecessary baggage of a religious searcher – welcomed me as the person-still-in-process that I was.

Here in the Unitarian church I have been free to choose the beliefs I carry, free to change those beliefs as my heart and mind have changed over the years, free to leave behind the outmoded tenets of a theology which no longer inspired me or provided me a reliable compass for my journey.  What I bring and what I leave behind – these are my choices in this church, and there are still very few churches, dear friends, where that is the case.

Oh, we each have the option at any time to go it alone, without religious community, of course.  I’ve done that at some points in my life, been without a church home.  You probably have too.  And if you have, you probably discovered as I did, that the spiritual journey can be a lonely one for the solitary explorer.

In the end, I suspect that our collective quest for Truth and Meaning, for the Sublime and the Eternal, for Goodness and Justice and Mercy, – the age-old Polar search for God – is rewarded the only way it ever is: we find life’s meaning “around the edges, tucked into the corners of our days,” to use Annie Dillard’s wonderful way of saying it.

Here on the cusp of a new church year (our 175th as a worshipping congregation here in Brooklyn), a new season of change, as autumn’s gentler ambiance is due to arrive on the Western wind any week now, our varied religious sensibilities will converge in the month ahead.

In the varied images and language of the holy season ahead, we are invited to consider what we shall bring into a new year, and what we shall leave behind.  What is truly essential to life as we hope to live it from these days forward, and what might we put down, what belongs more properly to the past?  I, for one, give thanks on my journey for the company of so many wonderful companions who call this church their home.

And so, I bid warm welcome to our newest members.  And I welcome too those of you who are only now discovering the Unitarian Universalist community for the first time.  And I welcome you back, those of you who have been away for a while, for whatever reasons.  We are a better church with you here than we are without you.

Lastly, to those faithful ones among us, who year after year, week after week, assume their accustomed place in these hallowed pews, allow me this one pastoral suggestion for this anniversary year.  I hope this year you take a fresh look at what this church has come to mean to you over the years.  Sometimes our long familiarity with an old institution makes it much easier and tempting to criticize than to volunteer to improve the life of the church.  I invite you to consider how you might become part of the volunteer crew of the church this year, and not just one of the passengers.

That is, after all, how you can help us decide what we as a congregation will bring with us into the future, and what we will leave behind in the past.

Amen.