Rev. Anthony David
June 10, 2007
This past Wednesday, the staff here at Pathways Church went on retreat. We wanted to be intentional about saying goodbye to each other as my time here comes to a close and Lisa Efthymiou steps down from her role as Director of Religious Education, with Stefanie Newton being the only current staff member continuing on. And so, early Wednesday, all three of us piled into Stefanie’s SUV and buzzed on over to Plano, to Prince of Peace Catholic Church, where we spent the morning with a spiritual director who helped us do this: stop the onrush of our days; pause and reflect on our past together with all its accomplishments and challenges and gifts; and anticipate what’s coming up, what’s ahead. In a spirit of peace, and reflection, and care—mindful of the presence of the Sacred—we were saying goodbye to the past, so that we might be freer to say hello to the future. This was our retreat experience.
And two particular things about it stand out for me. One has to do with simply how wonderful it was to stop the clock for a time, and to open up into an expanded Now. You might think that this is something church staff get to do regularly because, after all, they work at a church—but not really. The time crunch and the stress of a million things to do is as high here as anywhere else, and we get caught up in it. I know it personally, working 60 hours a week on average, with some of it in the public eye and in the office, but much of it in the background. Like everyone else, church staff endure the squeeze of the clock, so it felt so good for the spiritual director, whose name is Eunice, to start the retreat by inviting us to pause and consider the sea shell displayed at the center of our meeting table. It was a nautilus shell, and Eunice asked us to consider the fact of its many chambers. Each and every moment is like that, she said—just stop the rush of events and pause, direct your attention into the moment at hand, and that single moment will contain chamber after chamber after chamber after chamber, just like the nautilus shell. Deepen into the moment, deepen into its many chambers, and experience the sweetness and sacredness of your life. That’s what our spiritual director said. That’s the message with which Eunice began the retreat.
And I need to tell you about the larger context in which it all happened. This is the second thing that stands out for me. Strictly speaking, the retreat happened in a small meeting space within the Prince of Peace Catholic Church campus, but as for that larger space—it was amazing, especially the sanctuary. Let me tell you about the sanctuary. Prince of Peace serves something like 5000 people, so the sanctuary was immense. But what really took my breath away has nothing to do with size. It has to do with vision—it’s always about the vision, for me. The sanctuary took the form of a huge tent. Not a big-top-circus kind of tent, but a we-are-nomads-living-in-the-desert kind of tent. The structure is permanent, yes, but the impression you get is that of a people always on the move, just like the Israelites during their 40-year sojourn in the desert, led by Moses, on the move towards the Promised Land. It means that every time you come into the Prince of Peace sanctuary, you see what looks like the interior of a huge tent, the massive frame holding all of it up exposed, lamps hanging down looking like they hold lit candles—you see all of this, and you can’t help but think: I am not alone, and my life is not without meaning. My personal story is linked to a larger communal story, and that story has to do with liberation from some kind of bondage. We are moving away from slavery in Egypt, and we are moving towards the Promised Land. The ancient story is alive here and now. Egypt is just a name for whatever breaks us; the Promised Land is just a name for whatever heals us, makes us whole, sends us back into the world as servant leaders. And from one to the other, we move. It’s what we do and who we are. We change, we adapt, we move—all of us, towards a better future.
These are the two things that stand out, for me, about the staff’s retreat this past Wednesday. Stopping the clock and opening up into the expanded Now. Remembering that we are a people always on the move, towards the Promised Land. And through all of it, I was so grateful to be a Unitarian Universalist, because my Unitarian Universalism within me seeks out truth and meaning wherever it is to be found, like a magnet grabs for steel, or like a plant turns towards light. Unitarian Universalism does not cut me off from the riches of the Christian faith or the Jewish faith but rather invites me in and allows me to incorporate the best of what I experience there with the best of other world wisdom traditions. At Prince of Peace Catholic Church, guided by a spiritual director named Eunice, I found my way home again, and I found my message for this Sunday.
Which is all about living in interesting times. Which is all about how to be when change happens, or when plans are disrupted, or when you find yourself in a place you never thought you’d be, or even when a dream finally becomes real—and the question becomes, what’s next? A death, a sickness, divorce; a new job, a new relationship, a new baby. How to live and to be in interesting times. What can give us strength and courage for the journey ahead.
Let me share a quick aside. Got an email just the other day from a staff member at First Unitarian Church in Dallas. He receives our weekly email newsletter, and with our most recent one he was reminded of my leaving to serve another church in Atlanta. It was the subject line that caught my eye, which made me smile, and then it made me groan. Here’s what it read: “Happy Trials.”
Happy trials. Interesting times. And for me, one answer is found in distinguishing carefully between two things: the clock, and the compass. It’s a distinction that leadership guru Steven Covey likes to make. The clock represents the surface of our lives, measured in days and hours and minutes, time-crunched, driven from task to task to task to task, effective and successful to the degree we are fast, to the degree we produce in ever more quantities.
That’s the clock, but now consider the compass. If the clock represents the surface of our lives, the compass represents depth. If the clock represents what is immediate and feels urgent, the compass represents what is important and what you focus on no matter how urgent things feel. The clock dictates to us from the outside; the compass guides us from within. The clock is someone or something else’s vision and values; the compass represents our own vision, our own core values, our own principles and our own purposes.
Clock and compass are very different, and a few quotes can help to clarify things even more. The first comes from the spiritual director from the staff retreat: “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” Then there is a quote from Rabbi Jesus: “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Finally, consider this quote (I wrote it) which refers to the situation of the Israelites wandering the desert, so many years ago: “It was a 40 year trip that could easily have been made in less than 40 days, and yet, had the Israelites not taken the full 40 years, they would never have made it to the Promised Land.”
Those are the quotes, and I know the last one might be a bit of a puzzler, so more about it in a moment. For now, just see how all of them telegraph the difference between clock and compass and ask the critical, crucial question: which one will you steer your life by? Which one will you rely on as you journey through happy trials and interesting times?
Clock or compass, compass or clock? I like how poet Marie Howe suggests one way in which this question comes before us as individuals, struggling with individual decisions. Her poem is called, “My Dead Friends,” and it goes like this:
I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering
question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive
a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—
whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s
ashes were—
it’s green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and
he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says, I’ll do.
That’s the poem by Marie Howe. That’s how she envisions the compass working in her life. In the midst of bewilderment, she stops the clock, she follows the way of the nautilus shell and goes deep. She wonders, What would my dead friends say? What would Billy say? Should I return the difficult phone call? Should I follow the path to true joy? And the answers are YES and YES—and notice especially how the two go together…. Notice how more life and less worry don’t mean the absence of difficult conversations or difficult situations. It means that if we avoid the difficult conversations or difficult situations—if we are not present to them in an open and nonanxious way—then less life will be ours. Less joy. We’ll move faster through our lives, perhaps—we’ll satisfy the demands of the clock—but our relationships will end up flat with niceness, and fraught with loneliness. That’s not a recipe for joy. Not at all.
Marie Howe’s poem brings the question of the compass home to us as individuals, but there’s another layer here. The question also addresses us as community—as friends and members of Pathways united by shared values and shared dreams, so people pull together and not apart. That’s the other layer at issue here—being united and staying united—and as we turn to this, think back to the quote I mentioned earlier about the journey of the Israelites in the desert. “It was a 40 year trip that could easily have been made in less than 40 days, and yet, had the Israelites not taken the full 40 years, they would never have made it to the Promised Land.” Now, here is a case where the clash between clock and compass is huge. From a clock perspective, it is simply atrocious for a journey to take 40 years when it could have happened in 40 days or less. Talk about lost time! Talk about lost productivity! But it’s far more understandable when you see things from the compass perspective, because then you understand what the entire journey was all about. The journey was about getting Egypt out of the Israelites. That’s what it was. Those Israelites saw with their own eyes ten plagues, the saw with their own eyes the parting of the Red Sea, bread from heaven, water from rocks, quail blown to them by the wind, and countless kingdoms threatening their very existence obliterated. They saw miracle after miracle with their own eyes, and yet they still whined to go back to Egypt, they still begged and pleaded and plotted and revolted, all to go back to their life of slavery, back to their oppression and back to their unhappiness, back to what they were used to. Egypt was still within them, as a state of heart and mind. They were their own worst enemies.
And so the 40 year sojourn in the desert was about unlearning all that. Realizing that they don’t have to carry the weight of the curse that another people put upon them. They don’t have to carry that weight. They can shrug that curse off, throw it down, and take up a blessing, take up and live out a story that is truly their own. Realizing that. Coming to their senses about that. Going on to do something more positive. Forming, for themselves, a positive core of vision and values that would guide them from within. Their own inner compass. A reason for being that is their own, and not someone else’s.
And all this takes time. It takes time to realize that we don’t have to be a slave to the clock and all that that represents; it takes time for the inner compass to form within a community; it takes time for a members of a community to learn how to make compass-based decisions together; and every time the community reverts back to the old way of slavery to the clock, they suffer the consequences, they have to work to undo things and reclaim the compass way of life.
It takes time. And I have to say, among my proudest achievements here with you has been the formation of what we call our DNA. I’m talking about our growth pattern, which we define in the form of our mission, our core convictions, and our core practices. Thankfully the process of developing our DNA didn’t take 40 years, but only 4. And we are still learning how to steer by it, how to choose it over the tyranny of momentary crises and momentary loud voices, wheels that are perhaps too squeaky.
What a journey the past four years have been—three years, if we are counting back from the earliest Pathways worship experiences. And while the interior of this place doesn’t exactly look like the Prince of Peace Catholic Church sanctuary, still, in my mind’s eye I see a tent rising up above us and covering us, because we too are a nomadic people, we too are a people changing and adapting and on the move, on the way towards the Promised Land.
And the times are interesting. Happy trials. Your old minister moves on, and new ones are coming: first the interim, and then the settled. And this is what I recommend to you, in the upcoming days and months and years: remember your compass. Be guided by it. When a clock perspective threatens to take over, and all of a sudden you find yourself anxious about numbers of any kind, or whether this or that is happening fast enough, STOP! Stop the clock. Follow your compass instead.
It means being purpose-driven, above all. Your sole reason for existing is changing lives. The world hungers for liberation, so help it to happen. Remember this, especially when the diversity of opinion in this place becomes too much, oversteps and violates our healthy dialogue covenant with each other, escalates, becomes soap opera, becomes high drama—and all of a sudden the mission to change lives has been hijacked, sabotaged—all of a sudden power struggles take center stage. If this ever happens—and I’m not saying it’s going to, necessarily—but if it ever does, and individuals and groups get stuck on having their own way, and it’s their way or the highway—STOP! You’ve lost your way. Stop and do a compass check. The only question that ultimately matters is, Are we changing lives? Are we living a liberation story, and are we helping as many people as possible to find a way into that? That’s what’s worth sacrificing getting our own way for. That’s what’s worth sacrificing our fears and anxieties for. That’s it.
And though we have never seen with our own eyes such miracles as the ancient Israelites did—though we never seen Red Seas part, or bread from heaven, or water from rocks—we have had our own miracles. Two years ago, when unexpected circumstances forced Pathways Church to become financially independent, and everything was thrown into chaos, a miracle of faith rose up in this place. I saw it, and many of you saw it. A miracle of resolve. A miracle of generosity. Pathways Church is now stronger than ever, and frankly, you are no stranger to interesting times. Your character is already proven. The miracle of your continuing life is already in the Book of Life. So go forward from here. Be guided by compass, not clock. Be a people on the move, on the move, away from Egypts of every quality and every kind, and always always towards the Promised Land. Always. Amen.