First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Bread for the Journey

As Bill Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz pursue their quixotic adventure on the Appalachian Trail, they become accustomed to its necessities. It never gets easy, certainly never as easy as they had fantasized that it would be, but of course the challenge was part of the point to start with. Still, the weather grows warmer, their muscles harden with daily use, and they learn what is and is not important to carry with them. The packs never grow light, but they become reliable resources of those things which it really matters to have. Periodically the two men arrive at towns along the route, where they can shower, eat in a restaurant, and replenish their supplies. Over time they learn what sustains them best in the wilderness, and how to bring it with them in the most manageable way.

Perhaps a few of you are going to be setting out on some kind of adventure this summer, challenging your limits and looking for strengths you didn’t know you had. For sure these high school graduates are going forth to a new journey, changing work and school and living arrangements as they transition into greater independence, and move toward the horizon of adulthood. And of course the new members we welcome today are joining the rest of us on this somewhat improbable caravan through the challenges of human existence here in 21^st century America. It seems to me that we might do well to consider what it is that we carry with us on these metaphorical journeys; whether we have what we need to avoid undue hardship, or whether we make the process harder than it needs to be by dragging with us what we might better drop by the way. Here are a few of the things that I hope we have stowed over the years into the backpacks of our departing young people, as well as a few items that I would urge you to part with now, since they will take up space, and add nothing of value to the trip.

To begin with, it is tempting for us to stuff your knapsacks and carry bags and everything down to your pockets with so much of our love that there is no room left for anything else. We know this won’t work for you in the long run, but pardon us our eagerness to send you forth crammed with all the enormous affection and pride we have for you. As you patiently replace that overflow with sterner necessities, let me invite you to leave a few crumbs lurking in the corners and odd spaces; it will snuggle in anywhere, and on some cold, shadowy evening when you are alone or unhappy, a little piece of that love might warm and comfort you more than you now imagine.

You will want to bring a healthy supply of curiosity, because any journey can only teach you as much as you are willing to learn. If your goal is just to get from here to there as fast as possible, you may arrive at achievement, but you will miss the adventure along the way, and at the end of that path lies emptiness. You need a new dose of curiosity every morning, for each day holds its own surprises, even the rainy, muddy ones. Curiosity is the antidote to judging the world, and sulking because it fails to live up to your expectations. Those expectations, by the way – of what you deserve, and the way things are supposed to work, and how everybody else is supposed to behave – good things to jettison, as quickly as possible. You may not be able to help bringing them along at first, but they get heavy fast. Replace them, whenever you can, with curiosity; let go of your preconceptions, and find out how the world really operates. The journey will be both pleasanter and more productive.

Perhaps the heaviest item that is really essential is your integrity. This can be awkward to manage, and to pack, and it may be tempting to leave it behind, thinking that when you have gotten over a particularly rough piece of trail, you can come back and retrieve it. But the truth is that like a good compass, the guidance of integrity is indispensable; without it, you will soon find yourself floundering in swampy waters, or backed into a high canyon with no good way out. And much as you may rely upon the friendship of companions along the way, or even the teachings of communities like this one, there is no substitute for carrying your personal integrity. For only the direction of your own convictions can guide you rightly; to depend on someone else’s borrowed integrity will never take you where you need to go. Whatever else you may sacrifice, hang on to integrity.

Pack as much existing wisdom as you already have; alone, it will never be enough to see you to the end of the journey, but judiciously mixed in with new experiences and questions and learnings, it will help everything hold together. At some moments it may feel as if everything you thought you knew has been tossed into a top hat and is up for grabs, but over time certain hard truths will emerge again and again as dependable. The poet Robert Frost speaks of returning to his friends after a challenging journey, and says, "They would not find me changed from what they knew; only more sure of what I thought was true." That is part of the gift of any adventure; that under the pressures of risk and suffering, some part of our previous wisdom is affirmed, and becomes more and more trusted. The same is true of relationships; like Bryson’s wry friendship with Katz, they reveal their edges and their substance through confronting hardships, and having lost their illusions, become solid. Illusions start out innocently enough, but grow more and more of a burden; that is why you can afford to pack all the wisdom you have. Those pieces which reveal themselves to be illusions should be tossed aside – ‘flung’, as Katz put it – while the rest will become tempered tools for dealing with both daily drudgeries and unforeseen events. If you had all the wisdom you needed to start with, the journey would be pointless, but start with as much as you can gather. Stupidity has no payoff.

Also useful is a good balance of generosity and appreciation; a willingness to be helpful, and to be helped. For along the journey there will inevitably be times when you find yourself in a situation of need, plain and simple. Maybe it will be because of some fluke event that no one could have foreseen or prepared for; maybe it will be because you did something truly dumb. In either case, the only way for things to come right will be for someone else to help you out; someone who doesn’t owe you anything, and who you are in no position to repay. In such a situation, it is good to be gracious; it is good to have the humility and saving sense of humor to be able to ask for what you need, and to give thanks without resentment or embarrassment. Our western Enlightenment culture, with its emphasis on individuality and self-sufficiency, may not prepare us well for these occasions, but there is no avoiding them. As Katz and Bryson discovered on their walk in the woods, there is an unwritten code of the Appalachian Trail; people are not to pester one another, but if someone is clearly in trouble, you don’t pass by and ignore them. Directions, advice, sustenance; all these are to be shared as needed, and received with untroubled appreciation. Though every group and each individual has his or her own journey to make, the trail is a shared universe, in which everyone is to some extent in it together – not unlike the "real world." By the same token, of course, bring your own generosity as well, for you never know when it will be your turn to come across a fellow traveler in trouble, who is failing for want of something that you might provide. The map, the candy bar, the band aid, the hour of conversation that you can well spare, could save someone else’s whole summer, or perhaps only get them through one more day. Either way, to share ungrudgingly is the path to wholeness, as tradition after tradition has taught about the spiritual life. Both generosity and appreciation serve to lighten the pack load, for they prevent guilt and resentment, and these are some of the heaviest and most useless burdens that we can carry.

Though it may seem at first like a needless luxury, it is advisable to pack your sketchbook, or journal, or camera – whatever medium you favor for the best capturing of memories. If the journey does its intended work, you will be different at the end of it, but you may not find it so easy to recall the process by which you got that way, unless you have a day by day reminder of how the adventure unfolded. Words can do it; pictures can do it. Simple things, like notes of what you ate and how you slept, or the birds and flowers you photographed, or the notes you wrote to those at home or for your blog, can bring back with them a whole raft of inner and outer connected experiences. Such memories are the very stuff of life, but what seems indelible in the moment may fade as the pages turn, unless some artifact preserves it contours. It is true that the path lies always forward before you; there are miles to be covered, tasks to be done, responsibilities to be fulfilled. Attempting to live in the past is an illusion that serves no one, but attempting to live without the past makes it impossible to accumulate wisdom. Memories are an important part of the bread for your journey; leave room to cherish them, for they will teach you and comfort you in many difficult moments.

Finally, be sure to bring on your journey a handful of songs. These weigh nothing at all, take up no precious space in your gear, yet they can lighten a discouraged heart, and energize tired feet, with instant power. Any song will do, even irrelevant or silly ones, but consider also the songs that actually express something about what matters to you, or what you believe in. Songs operate to reinforce our values at a level beyond the conscious mind; this is why we want you to have a copy of the hymnbook for your own, and there are many other kinds of songs that do this as well. Load up your i-pod, certainly, for it is good to listen to the music of others, but the songs that will see you through the most challenging moments are the ones that you carry in your heart, and these can never be lost or taken away from you.

Three things to leave behind, if you can, or else to fling away as soon as you can; the need to be in control, the fear of responsibility, and the desire to appear more competent than you really are. I have already mentioned guilt, resentment, illusions, and preconceptions as commodities not worth their weight to haul along on the journey of life. It is the desire for control, to make the trail conform to our own plans, that lures us to try to foresee and forestall all possible eventualities, and thus bring along every item that might possibly come in handy. Such an approach makes the pack impossibly weighty, which in turn makes the journey itself slower and harder and far less pleasant. What must be carried is heavy enough; beyond this, some trust in our own ingenuity and endurance, and in the help of others, must take the place of control. At the same time, perhaps the heaviest stone of all is that of fear, especially fear of making decisions or taking responsibility for our own choices. The point of any journey is to make choices as thoughtfully as we can, and then see where the consequences lead us; that is the whole nature of adventure, and it is the process that will transform each of us into the larger, wiser person that at our best we hope to become. A wholesome caution is an important safeguard, but it is easy to bring along an oversupply of fear, and the more of it we fling away, the lighter our burdens grow.

Finally, the trail is no place for an inflated ego, and it’s like packing a feather mattress to try to get that in with the rest of the gear; not only is it difficult, but it makes you look ridiculous in the process. As Bryson and Katz discovered, you can’t know everything, or be good at everything; you can only bring a willingness to learn, and to discover both your true strengths, as well as your inadequacies, along the way. Someone will always be bounding ahead of you on the path, making you feel like a plodding klutz, and every so often you will come upon a fellow traveler having an even harder time than you. If there is anything to be learned from the former, learn it; if there is any help needed by the latter, offer it. But use neither as a yardstick to judge yourself, for neither is likely to give you a true measure. Rather, substitute humility and a sense of humor for ego wherever possible; they are by far the easier to carry.

Dearly Beloved, it is not just these young people who go forth to their journeys today; each of us is on the trail in one way or another. Even the path of learning to let go of life itself is a journey, with much to explore and discover. And each of our journeys is unique; we may share the same trail, but it is our own experience, even as we travel a way together. Yet we are not alone, and we need not make every mistake and run into every hardship for ourselves; we can learn from one another’s struggles, both the triumphs and the failures. We come together to share what we know, to warm ourselves at the campfire, and trade stories, to provide for one another our of our collective abundance. Centuries ago, our spiritual ancestors made a covenant with one another, to walk together as a community. For they knew that it was the journey that mattered, not staying huddled together in one place forever. The greater possibilities of the human spirit called them forward, and those ever-new possibilities call to us even today. May we find here in this community bread for the journey; songs and memories, a spirit of generosity and appreciation, wisdom, integrity and curiosity, and filling all the spaces in between, love. May our newest members discover help and hope and companionship among us, and may our dear children go forth upon the path of their emerging lives strengthened by what we have taught them, and our faith in them. May our adventures, wherever they take us, make us to grow in wisdom and compassion, and bring us together again in peace and gladness.

Opening words:

Good morning, and welcome, to this final Sunday of our program year.

Next week we begin gathering downstairs at 10:30 for our series of

Lay led summer assemblies;

These are delightful presentations, and we hope that you will join us.

Today we celebrate the comings and goings of our life as a community.

We welcome with gladness our newest members,

And we honor the transition of our high school seniors,

Who after years in the religious education program here,

Are moving into new phases in their lives as they graduate.

Let us acknowledge, even as we gather in celebration,

That there is much brokenness in the world that still awaits mending.

The tragic evil of war persists; children no different from our own suffer and die in it.

Even as we rejoice in the fellowship of this Society,

The homeless and disposed of our own city wonder whether anyone cares.

Injustice and oppression, hunger and disaster, stalk the human family around the globe,

And the earth itself trembles with the consequences of our thoughtlessness.

Nevertheless, in the midst of even these grave challenges and sorrows,

We lift our hearts in gladness for the life we share here.

In this covenant community of memory and promise,

We practice the sacred art of hospitality,

Weaving the connections of community by which the world is healed.

We lift up our young people, and the parents who have worked so diligently

To give them opportunities to grow and thrive.

In our celebrations we taste the world we long to see;

The world as we believe it could be, if we will labor earnestly for its transformation,

As we wish it to be for all children, for all people everywhere.

We take to heart the wisdom which teaches

That we must be the change we wish to see.

We kindle this chalice to illuminate that vision,

Reminding ourselves of our dedication to peace, justice, and freedom.

May its light summon people of good will everywhere to the same cause,

So that together we may build a world made fair, with all its people one.