A sermon by Deacons’ Co-chair Bryan Wiggins, June 21, 2009
Psalms 49:1-4
Hear this, all ye people; give ear, all ye inhabitants of the world, both low and high, rich and poor together. My mouth shall speak of wisdom, and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding. I will incline mine ear to a parable; I will open my dark saying upon the harp.
“My mouth shall speak of wisdom, and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding.”
This single line from Psalm 49 points to two roads I’ve traveled to search for meaning in my life. The one I’ve walked longer, the path of “spoken wisdom” is a lane paved with language, where insight is gained through the expression and exploration of ideas. But the newer path for me, a fainter trail that winds closer to the heart than the head, is lit by an inner light that shines from the practice of meditation. Like so many things in my life these days, I find I often travel the middle ground between these avenues. And I’ve come to believe that as a middle child, on the outer edge of middle age, trying to find the middle ground between answering the question of my life’s purpose and my surrender to it’s mystery, the middle is not such a bad place to be.
It’s also a place I’ve come to recognize when I reach it. Last March, I was driving home from Media, Pennsylvania, the town 15 miles west of Philadelphia that is home to Mendoza Group, the small Hispanic advertising agency I serve as Creative Director. My trips south have become more frequent since Dana and I began rearranging the feathers of our newly emptied nest after Tess departed for college.
It took me about half the trip to begin to wind down from the accelerated pace I had been revving at in Philly. It wasn’t until I reached Hartford that my grip on the wheel loosened and visions of advertising headlines and campaign deadlines began to fade for thoughts of home. In the middle of what has become a routine transitional trip, I was suddenly struck by the two poles my life orbits between.
I was born in Pennsylvania, and grew up among the mix of rolling hills, forests and farmland that marked the end of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line between Philadelphia and my hometown of Paoli. Our neighborhood was a wondrous place to explore as a child, whether piloting our bikes as we flew down Rolling View Drive or exploring the depths of the sparkling, mica-rich woods we knew as Silver City. But the green spaces I loved grew smaller each year as more and more strip malls and office parks devoured them.
By the time I entered college, Philadelphia’s suburban sprawl had escalated considerably, and my alienation from the landscape of my youth was matched by my separation from my family. The death of my sister and my parents’ subsequent divorce left me eager to fine a new place to call home. Dana and I spent four frenetic years in New York City after I graduated, and though Manhattan had its own insane and wild charms, it was not the kind of wilderness I could take root in.
That ground lay in Maine, where regular trips hosted by my art school buddy Hutch and his wife Mary, lay the groundwork for our future. We would often end our weekends north with a single day that would frame in sharp relief the two worlds we were caught between; Sunday morning would find us ascending through cloudbanks, scrambling up pink granite ridges to feast upon the view of peaks and pines that stretched to the horizon in all directions from the summit of Mt. Katahdin, while Sunday evening would end with a long gray bus ride that crawled from LaGuardia to deposit us in the sterile lobby of the New Jersey Port Authority. It didn’t take many of these trips before I began plotting our escape to Maine, a deal I sealed with Dana with a promise to start our family once we were settled north. I will always remember our arrival in the place we claimed as home.
You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That spontaneous full-body sigh that’s released as you cross the Piscataquis river in Portsmouth and see the first sign welcoming you to Maine, a marker placed at the apex of the bridge’s curve, as if rising to meet it confirms that your destination really does mark the pinnacle of “the way life should be.” Like me, I suspect you’ve relished those last few miles, where the rush and crush of cars and blight of urban scars that choke the Eastern seaboard gives way to the green open road that leads home. Making this trip at night can feel like a journey through space and time, a sojourn that starts amid signs and walls washed in the glare of the sodium streetlights that ignite cities to the south, blue/white blazes that grow fewer and farther with each passing mile, until you reach the inky outer edge of the Northeast’s galaxy in Maine.
I have relished the years I’ve spent on the fragile fringe of southern Maine, a place poised between our past definition of progress to the south and the green, sustainable world above it that provides our best model for our future, a place with the rare vantage that allows us to see the benefits of where we’ve been, and where we’re going; a place in the middle.
But while I’ve never regretted raising my family in a land where a morning’s silence is more often interrupted by a birdcall than a phone call, and the blessings of the wild are always only a short hike or paddle away, each passing year has given me a greater appreciation of the need for community and the realization that the path to my most complete self leads through the lives of others.
My professional career has marked my progression towards this realization. A few years after moving to Maine, I rejoiced when Internet bandwidth grew wide enough to allow for the regular transmission of the scanned sketches and final art that were the products of my freelance illustration career. No more trips to FedEx to ship my work, no more client meetings to review concepts, no more changing out of my pajamas to start the workday. At that time I actually prided myself on my lack of personal contact with my clients. I thought my artwork should speak for itself, and that the small talk and pleasant banter that usually bookended conversations of commerce were at best distractions and at worst the means by which less talented artists would try to “sell” their creations to clients.
But over the years my pride in self-sufficiency was replaced by a growing hunger for communion with others. When I made the move to full-time virtual employment with Mendoza Group, my emails started to grow longer until I realized that the replies from my coworkers were going in the other direction. So I replaced them with frequent phone calls, and finally, convinced my boss to outfit the office with webcams so I could regularly meet with our staff face to face, or really, screen to screen.
Those meetings were certainly more lively and intimate than the quiet clicks of email exchange, but still paled in comparison to real time spent with real people. Consequently, I’ve scheduled more frequent trips to town, journeys that have certainly helped me perform my job more efficiently, but that I value most for the insight, laughter and compassion that can really only be fully conveyed in common company.
And so I bounce. Back and forth, a few weeks in Pennsylvania, a few weeks in Maine, trying to find the middle ground between community and solitude, a place to connect and reflect. A place I’ve searched for with all of you.
For years, our church has stimulated the search for deeper meaning in my life and helped me find it through the family of friends that have embraced me within these walls. You have helped shape the lives of each member of my family and created a place where Dana, Amelia, Tess and I have regularly been touched by the power of God’s love. That power has arced in a thousand sparks that have jumped from your hearts to ours; a warm greeting in the narthex, an offer of help in a board meeting, a shared laugh over coffee, a shared prayer in times of trial. Each connection going further to dispel the myth of our separation and reveal the common mystery that unites our lives.
We’ve plumbed the depths of that mystery in quiet reflection. And the quest for spiritual union we’ve shared together has taken me on a path outside of, but not away from our church. It’s a road that runs between my past approach to spiritual reflection through Christian prayer and my current exploration of Buddhist meditation, a road that runs in the middle.
My experience of Christian prayer has always been one of duality. I’ve shaped my appeals or praises to a God outside of myself, a being I’ve sought union with or benevolence from. This relationship has been comfortable and familiar, because it is familial. Whether we think of God as Father or Mother, seeking love and harmony with the one who cares for us is an essential urge that is born deep within us and that we carry throughout our lives. Dialogue with that being, whether expressed as our first loud cries for the milk of our mother or our final whispered deathbed prayers for union with our father in heaven, is the most primal form of conversation, a quest for unity that takes the shortest path possible from heart to heaven.
Trying to understand God through the framework of family affords us the chance to unlock the infinite with the keys of the intimate. I believe this is the wisdom that lies at the heart of the gospels, the story of God the father manifested as the son of man, living among the brothers and sisters of His very human family. But the transformation of the deceptively simple story of Christ’s life on earth into the revelation of how to live a meaningful life in harmony with God can only occur within the theater of our individual awareness.
Ever since I took my first philosophy course in college, I’ve come to appreciate the power of Socratic dialogue to reveal truth; the notion that the question of life’s meaning is best answered not by a litany of declarations, but in the space between questions that is bridged by personal interpretation.
Jesus was an expert at employing this technique. “Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from man? Whose likeness is on the coin? “Who do you say I am?” All were questions that He asked to answer questions. In the same way, His parables put the responsibility for divining meaning on any listener hungry enough for truth to reflect on these stories and complete them for themselves.
Many of Jesus’ teachings and parables, certainly the psalms, and much of the rest of the bible is poetry, an art form that is only half complete when the author lays down his pen and can only fully come to fruition in the mind of the reader. When I write my own poetry, I try to stay sensitive to the charged breach between the transmission and reception of an emotion, image or idea. I’ve learned to respect it as sacred space; a place where a skilled artist can compose a spare melody that touches the common chords of meaning that play through all of our lives while allowing each reader to complete the score with music of their own.
Though the poetry of the gospels can touch our hearts, much of this path to knowing God travels through our heads. This is because it is a road paved with language, the tool we use not only to communicate with each other, but to construct the thoughts that define our experience of living in the world.
There is another way to access experience, however, one that is particularly useful in exploring the spiritual terrain of our lives: the practice of meditation. That practice is certainly familiar to this church, in the potent moment of silent prayer that is the part of our worship, and in those moments when we turn off our interior dialogue to absorb an anthem or silently center ourselves before Sunday service begins.
My first step towards investigating meditation began here in Guptil Hall two years ago. Over Lenten soup supper, I asked Debby Riley what books she was reading and she enthusiastically recommended Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth”. Tolle’s book revealed to me the limits of language-based thought and the power gained by living life fully in the moment. It was a powerful revelation, but it left me wondering how to access the “now” regularly in my life.
That search lead me to read several books on Buddhism, since meditation is the central practice Buddhists employ to still the mind’s interior dialogue in order to have a deeper, more profound, more “present” experience of the world. Although I found accounts of the life of the Buddha compelling and instructive, and celebrated Buddhism’s emphasis on nurturing compassion for others, my exploration of this spiritual path was really driven by my desire to incorporate the practice of meditation into my daily life.
Of course I’m not the first Christian to do so. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and scholar of comparative religion, spoke of his experience of meditation as follows:
“Contemplative prayer has to be always very simple, confined to the simplest of acts and using no words or thoughts. This prayer of the heart introduces us into deep interior silence so that we learn to experience its power. We seek the deepest ground of our identity with God – a direct experiential grasp just like St. Augustine sought when he prayed, ‘May I know you, may I know myself.'”
And James Finley, a student of Merton’s, expresses meditation as a way to access God without the duality that frames much of traditional Christian prayer. He writes:
“To practice meditation as an act of religious faith is to open ourselves to the endlessly reassuring realization that our very being IS the generosity of God. For God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence in the present moment is the manifested presence of God. We meditate that we might awaken to this unitive mystery in every moment of our lives.”
Christian-rooted Quakerism also honors meditation as a path to enlightenment. Quakers believe that within each individual lies the seed of divine light, which can be uncovered through meditation. Their meetings begin when all are joined in the act of “centering down.” With mind and body stilled, members sit in deep contemplative silence together for an hour, each person attuned to his or her own inward light.
Communal meditation like this has the power to magnify its effects. As Finley so eloquently states: “A single log in a fireplace does not burn as easily or as intensely as several logs burning together. And today, the same impetus toward contemplative community is expressing itself in a movement in which Christians are gathering in small groups to practice meditation and contemplative prayer together.”
I’ve only been meditating for two months, but experienced this phenomenon once. I took a six-week course at the Buddhist Shambhala Center in Portland that began each weekly class with a half-hour sitting. Most weeks found me struggling not to struggle, to ease into the relaxed yet focused frame of mind that seems to set the stage for deepening awareness. On the final night of the class, however, I was able to sustain my “mindfulness” and was keenly aware of the almost audible buzz of energy that filled the small room in the form of a ringing silence I felt as much as heard.
I have dipped into these same waters for briefer periods during the 20 or 30 minutes I spend each morning trying to still my mind to reveal the mysterious ocean of compassion that sustains and connects us all. It is so powerful and yet so easy to miss. Like my life in Cape Elizabeth, I’m surrounded by an ever-present wonder that ripples or roars around me while I drive by blind until an unexpected turn in the road reveals what my fractured, frantic life so often conceals.
At its heart, I find meditation is more about revelation than elevation. The practice does not lift me from my ordinary life to take me to some rarified celestial realm, but instead alters my perspective by a few critical degrees that yields a truer view of the nature of reality. For me, this is often a transition that begins peripherally, with my mind focused on my breathing I sense the world outside the edge of my awareness begin to shift, shimmer, and draw in to encompass me, as if the circles from a stone thrown into the pool of my awareness have reversed to run back to embrace their source.
When that pool stills, I relax, I release, I open to a place of deep peace that embraces contradiction. It is a place of great beauty, but also of great sorrow, a realm that both calms my soul and energizes my spirit, a place in the middle.
I don’t always get there. Many days the swirl of my thoughts refuses to settle and the time I spend sitting is nothing more than an expression of my commitment to allow for the possibility for stillness to happen. But I’ve found that even this act has great power. Simply making time to sit in meditation is a daily declaration of intent that reminds me of where I am trying to go; a promise to myself to try to live a less reactive, more fully aware and intentional life. A life lived between breaths, in the space between inhalations of the crystalline air of self-awareness and exhalations that release our fears and blow down the barriers that block our rightful union with each other. A life lived in the middle.
Next week the girls and I will travel to our second spiritual home: Baxter State Park. For the past 28 years our time spent in the shadows and on the summits of Katahdin have been week-long meditations; the direct experience of God in and through nature. I spent a day there once in complete meditation. Alone on a backcountry pond, I focused not on my breath, but on the streamer I tied to the end of my line, on the arc of my cast, on the circles that spread from its landing. That day entered me, became a part of me, became a poem, a psalm, a meditation of my heart that I tried to express in words of wisdom, a day that dawned in the middle place between knowing God through experience, and knowing Him through communication and communion with others.
The poem’s titled Dry Flies:
The pond opened in the woods
Like the stillness inside me
A pregnant absence
Where all that surrounds
Sounds
In the hallowed hollow
Where meaning
Meets the lack of need for meaning
Those waters waited
For winter
Single bird cries died
Far within the forest
An hour apart
A red squirrel chattered the perimeter
Unanswered, all short day long
The faintest flutter
Of a dragonfly, paper dry
Was quelled by the quiet
And the distant roar in trees
Promised white sleep in the wind
I tried a Wooly Bugger
A Bead Head and a Muddler’s
Maybe a man with finer fingers
And more hours learning lakes
Could have coaxed dinner from those depths
But I quit early
Not disappointed by slack line
But certain that place
Offered only a cache
Of summer echoes to catch
I put away hope
Of finding August in October
And kept my dry flies dry