"From Exile to New Life"

READING

"Eat, Pray, Love" is an unlikely story for Easter or Passover: a troubled young woman fleeing a nasty divorce and a broken romance decides to spend a year traveling abroad. She spends four months each in Rome, India, and Bali, with a different quest for each location: good food and drink in Rome; yoga and meditation in India, and love and friendship in Bali. The trip sounds perfect - but there are many rough patches, such as this one, which happens early on:

"here I am. I am in Rome, and I am in trouble. The goons of Depression and Loneliness have barged into my life again . . . I don't know what to do, and I'm spiraling in panic, like I always spiral when I don't know what to do. So what I do for tonight is reach for my most private notebook, which I keep next to my bed in case I'm ever in emergency trouble. I open it up. I find the first blank page. I write:

'I need your help.'

Then I wait. After a little while, a response comes, in my own handwriting:

'I'm right here. What can I do for you?'

And here commences my strangest and most secret conversation. Here, in this private notebook, is where I talk to myself. . . . I found that voice . . . in times of code-orange distress, and have learned that the best way for me to reach it is written conversation. I've been surprised to find that I can almost always access that voice, too, no matter how black my anguish may be. . . .

So tonight I reach for that voice again. This is the first time I've done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal tonight is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I'm scared they will never leave. . . .

In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. . . .

I fall asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest . . . In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of Depression's lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy Loneliness beat it too."

SERMON

An ancient Hebrew clan, living in oppression under the Pharaoh in Egypt, once gathered the courage to flee. Though they faced hardship and uncertainty, their journey led them to freedom and new life. The story of Passover is central to Jewish tradition, a compelling narrative that is retold each year at the Seder table.

Christian Easter is also about freedom and new life. Jesus traveled back to Jerusalem, knowing he faced arrest, and came anyway, in defiance of those who opposed him. They killed him. But they could not kill the spirit that inspired his followers. It lives again, they say.

The theme of the struggle for freedom and new life lives on in the experience of many people today. Immigrants of every generation break through bonds - and borders - in the quest for freedom and new life. The journey across the desert is still as dangerous as it was in the time of Moses. The yearning is also just as strong; the possibility of renewal just as risky and compelling as it was for the followers of Jesus.

The stories that tradition has handed down and the newer versions updated each day always have something to teach us this time of year. We don't really have to question why we return to them each spring. It takes only a small leap of imagination to see how freedom and new life are rooted in the earth's cycles of renewal. We and our stories are all part of nature too.

What are they trying to tell us? That the mystery of life is within us and that we can be agents of our own renewal. We may have to travel far, face danger, test our strength, to get where we need to be. But life is instinctively self-renewing, not only in the cycles of nature, but in the struggles of its creatures.

For most of us it's not quite as instinctive as the caterpillar we heard about earlier. She just knows she has to get to Mexico, although she doesn't know why. "Knowing what you know is sometimes very hard," she admits. At least she doesn't torture herself with doubts. The caterpillar turns into a butterfly, naturally, and makes the trip just in time to do her part for life cycle.

Reading Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," I could see how her trip around the world was a metamorphosis as well. Her story reminded me of all the ways we can send ourselves into exile, where freedom comes from self-discovery, and the new life we begin can happen to any of us, anywhere, at any time. Elizabeth Gilbert was in her thirties when it happened to her. She took an inner and an outer journey: the inner journey, into the depths of her loneliness and depression; the outer journey, to some of the most beautiful and interesting places in the world.

I have to admit, I read the book because I was more interested in the places initially. Rome and the Balinese town of Ubud are both dear to my heart. I wanted to remember what it was like to be there.

But I quickly got caught up in the larger story, the journey of a young woman who starts out "pinched and thin," lands in Italy, and slowly begins to recover herself. She has some hard times, as her private journal attests. By the time she is ready to move on, however, she has changed. "The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it," she writes, "is that I have put on weight. And I will leave with the hope," she adds, "that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own."

Reading this book and thinking of the arrival of spring, I began to see how any one story - such as the story of Elizabeth Gilbert - could be like the other stories - the stories of Passover and Easter. Her story is not trivial. The ancient stories have touched more people, perhaps. But they are all part of one story, that of a life that hurts and falters and finds a way to a better place.

This spring, we are hearing stories of exile and renewal everywhere, from the witness of immigrants from Central America. Their journeys are perilous. No doubt depression and loneliness haunt them too. The yearning for freedom and new life keeps them going.

They will change the shape of our society; they already have. Now we take up the complicated debate about citizenship and economic opportunity, and the global reverberations of migration. Underneath that complicated debate, however, is a simple affirmation: "the hope," as Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, "that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world."

The yearning for freedom and the mystery of new life bring about many different kinds of transformations. In Elizabeth Gilbert's case, she goes on from Rome to India, where she loses a lot of the weight she had put on. She lives in a remote ashram, and practices meditation and yoga. Her mantra, "Om Namah Shivaya," "I honor the divinity that resides in me," sustains her spirit the way pasta did in Italy.

It sounds flighty. But Elizabeth Gilbert's story is actually quite serious. She acknowledges that her approach to religion is eclectic; "cherry-picking," as one of her friends described it. Gilbert sees nothing wrong with that.

"I think you have every right to cherry-pick, she argues, "when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of [hu]mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats."

All good points for us to remember the next time someone asks us what Unitarian Universalists believe. By the time Elizabeth Gilbert leaves India, she is asking herself this question: "Don't we have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible?"

In her question, we hear it again: the story. The Passover story: the story of people who kept moving until they found a place where they could live and work and raise their families. The Easter story: the story of seekers who dream of a fuller life, who humble themselves before the mystery within. And the Spring story: the story of how people are renewed by the connection to the world all around them.

Elizabeth Gilbert's story ends in Bali. There she studies with an Indonesian medicine man, helps a poor family buy a home, and falls in love. She is "happy and healthy and balanced." She knows, because of the hard work she has done, that she is indeed the "administrator of [her] own rescue." "I think about the woman I have become lately," she writes, "about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself." The voice she hears when she writes in her notebook, when she is full of pain and loneliness, is also the voice that has called her into being, to become the person she always wanted to be. She is free. Her new life has begun.

Whether we tell the ancient stories or the new ones, this season is the time to remember how natural and how human it is to yearn for new life. Whether we accomplish it by working on ourselves, renewing our sense of purpose or discarding bad habits, and by working for the right of all people to have these opportunities, we are participating fully in the cycles of life and making new life possible in the process. Struggling for renewal is as instinctive for us as it is for all life, though our struggles are told in stories, ancient and modern, collective and individual. We write them in the book of life, and sometimes in the dark journals of the soul, but wherever we write and whatever we tell, there is always a voice that says, "I'm right here. What can I do for you?" And in that strange and secret conversation, we come to know the mystery of ourselves. That we are capable of leading our hurting and faltering souls towards freedom, renewal, and even the promised land. It is spring now. Time to be glad for those cycles of life, renewing our earth and our spirits, after every winter of the year.

Resource used to prepare this sermon: Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" (New York: Viking, 2006).