Call to Worship:
“When I am with you, everything is prayer.
I prayed for change,
so I changed my mind…”
-Rumi

First Reading: Psalm 121

Second Reading:
“Arise, oh Cup-bearer, rise! and bring
To lips that are thirsting the bowl they praise,
For it seemed that love was an easy thing,
But my feet have fallen on difficult ways…”
-Hafiz

Sermon:
I have a confession to make: I live next to the ocean and I know absolutely nothing about boats. I know, shocking right? I mean those of us who have lived here for a while have seen our fair share of flooding alone that such an omission seems foolish, if not downright dangerous. Yet, I persist in my daily awe at the ocean every time I travel from place to place knowing that the fight isn’t fair, that the ocean would win every time.

This understanding I have about the limitations of my knowledge is a fairly new phenomenon, and it sits quite uncomfortably in my mind. You see for years, I spent much of my time and energy putting all my effort into if not outright mastery, at least competence in the skills I deemed necessary for survival. Need to remodel my 1850 house without much money? Learn carpentry, and while maybe not excel at it, become at least competent enough to compensate for a house that is neither level nor plumb. Grow up without functional parents? Read every book, listen to every podcast, and take every piece of advice about parenthood, so that at least if I mess up, I have references. This attitude is so championed by our culture that we even have a name for it: bootstraps mentality. It is so useful for those of us who have grown up with severe deficits, but it doesn’t allow for that most fundamental of human needs: mystery. It turns out one can’t just read a book about faith and then have it. Faith requires a different set of skills, ones that might surprise you.

Both of the poets/mystics we have read in our service, Hafez and Rumi, have taught me almost all there is to know about mystery. Being as I experience the divine through literature first and foremost, contemplating the way they capture the divine has opened my perspective far beyond the limitations taught by my Catholic education. Hafez was a Persian (modern day Iran) mystical poet of the 14th Century. Hafez wrote in a traditional form known as the ghazal, a poem that expresses love for the divine. This love, though is represented in such a way that the difference between what we would call romantic love and spiritual love is blurred beyond recognition. This is a uniquely Persian form, but it has spread throughout the Islamic world in such a way that Islamic poetry is often spiritual and passionate in equal measure. Rumi, on the other hand, was a 13th century mystic from present day Afghanistan, who eventually settled in Turkey. He is known almost entirely as a spiritual teacher, poetry being secondary. Rumi spent his early life following a script: marrying, taking up the position of authority in his city and ruling in local matters. But then he met Shams e-Tabrizi, and Rumi became a mystic and ascetic. From that meeting on, all of his writing is infused with profound love for all things created by God. From Sufi functionary to Sufi mystic in short order, Rumi became a disciple of all things. His writing speaks of the “oneness” that is God and faith. And for those of us who have been deeply steeped in the Christian traditions, these approaches to poetry and faith are at the very least eye opening.

At this point, you are probably wondering what on earth these two things have to do with one another, interested as you may be in Persian poetry and the bootstraps mentality. I promise you, they are connected. Just hang in there!

The title of this reflection today is wayfaring, literally to journey on foot. In our modern age, to journey on foot always has some sort of path already established. It could be a hiking path or a modern road, aided by google maps, but we need do little to cut a swath through Salem unaided. That is, there are many paths laid out for us, and we have the opportunity to choose them, but they are there nonetheless making themselves known. Spiritual journeys, though, are made of entirely different stuff altogether. They are not the roads and sidewalks of a modern city. Instead, they are the ocean, stretched out in front of us, filled with currents, eddies, sandbars, and signs that only some of us can read. Navigating this world has no Google maps, though there are tools that can assist like depth meters and GPS. Interestingly, enough, though, this bootstraps mentality can be put to an entirely different use in place like the ocean.

This is where the poetry I reference has been my guide. Hafez and Rumi have nothing to teach me about the ocean, but they are enormously helpful in wayfinding, using signs as guides. Wayfinding is the companion to wayfaring, and it is the word I hope you take with you today, lover as I am of metaphors that guide us. Rumi and Hafez celebrate the mystery of this existence in all its forms. One of my favorite verses of Rumi reads:

“I died to the mineral state and became a plant,

I died to the vegetal state and reached animality,

I died to the animal state and became a man,

Then what should I fear? I have never become less from dying.

At the next charge (forward) I will die to human nature,

So that I may lift up (my) head and wings (and soar) among the angels”

I find profound comfort that if I turn all my attention, all my “bootstraps mentality” towards wonder, towards mystery, I will find a way forward that will be the path of a lifetime. And here is where it all ties together. The tools at our disposal are almost never the ones we think we need. We haven’t been born into knowledge of the tides. The level and the square require practice and precision. Instead, we have been born into wonder and mystery. We trade these things at our peril, but we do so with such encouragement that it seems hardly a tragedy. To do more than survive, to thrive, we must find our way back to that first state, that journey with no end but endless delight along the way. We already have what we need to navigate through uncharted waters, we need only be reminded that others, too, are taken up in the project, and through that we find our comfort along the journey.