"Journey and Quest"

The first three times the Apollo 8 crew circled the moon, they totally missed it. Only onthe fourth orbit did one of the crew members turn around and catch sight of our lonelyplanet, 240,000 miles away, shimmering blue and aswirl with clouds, impossiblygleaming against the blackness of space. The onboard tape recorder caught his words:?Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn't that something?" He scrambled for acamera, and clicked the image that launched the environmental movement: Earthrise.

There is more than one way to read this iconic image. On this vibrant planet live six billion people and countless creatures, great and small; beneath those swirling clouds lie mighty oceans and rivers, gleaming cities, the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Giza, the skyscrapers of Los Angeles. Earthrise reminds us that we are all in this together, that this little planet is all the planet we have.

And if you turn around, if you imagine looking from the earth out into space, you see that tiny porthole in the space ship where the astronauts floated, capturing that image for us. The three Apollo 8 astronauts are among the only humans to ever have lost contact with the earth, when they lost radio contact as they sailed around the dark side of the moon, and regained it on the other side. Although they have long since returned to earth, I think sometimes of their tiny ship out there in space, surrounded by immensity, vastness, mystery.

In the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the rich cadences of one Jean- Luc Piccard intone the opening monologue, which begins,

Space, the final frontier? ,

and say this with me, if you know it, we are a caring and open-minded congregation, no judgment, no judgment:

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. It?s continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, To boldly go where no one has gone before!

And then the horns pick up the theme, da da da da da da daaaaaa, and the ship zooms off into space, on its exciting new age mission to create peace and explore what it means to be fully human through encounters with alien worlds. Although it did seem in many episodes as if the aliens were limited by budget constraints, so they often had an eerie similarity to humans wearing wigs, maybe with some kind of exaggerated feature, like really big ears or forehead bumps. And I recently realized that the alien worlds were almost always played by Malibu Creek. No wonder I felt like I?d been there before, the first time I glimpsed that astonishing vista: mountains, ocean, canyon, water.

The search for a final frontier, the quest to seek out the new, the urge to explore is one that would be familiar to humans in all ages and cultures. The oldest stories begin, as all good stories do, with these words: once upon a time, a man went on a great journey. From this humble beginning a thousand epics spill: Dusty Sumerian cuneiform come tablets telling the story Gilgamesh?s journey to find eternal life; across the wine-dark sea sails the Greek hero Odysseus, finding his way home after ten years away at war. In medieval Europe, pilgrims on a journey meet for companionship on the road of the Canterbury Tales, while in Japan, the Zen poet Basho sets out from his house to take the narrow road to the deep north. The surroundings change, and the stories have their own wonderful particulars, woven in the context of their time and translated, adapted, and adopted into ours, and yet the story is still so familiar to us. It is the great narrative of journey and quest, wandering and wayfaring, pilgrim and passage.

In the congregation I served at First Parish in Cambridge, each week we called out a welcome, saying, Whoever you are and wherever you are on the journey of life or the journey of the spirit, we welcome you in our hearts. Unitarian Universalist communities I have known identify strongly as places of welcome for spiritual seekers, for those on the path who are not yet at home. We embrace the reality that is now true of the religious landscape far beyond these doors, that Americans continue to be spiritual pilgrims, that the generation coming of age today is less likely than ever before to worship where their parents worshipped, or to find the faith of their birth the faith of their adulthood. With open minds, open arms, and open hearts, our liberal faith strives to pitch a big tent for ?wanderers, worshippers, and lovers of leaving? who are ready to join a caravan, not of despair, but of love and hope.

All this motion and movement provides a sense of vital energy and excitement. Eager to share this message with others, I have been known to refer to Unitarian Universalism as a movement, rather than a denomination, a movement of communities working for justice and for change in this world.

The journey metaphor is powerful, writes religious scholar Sharon Daloz Parks.

It grasps essential elements of our experience. We do harbor a conviction that we were made for more. At the heart of the Jewish and Christian experience is a language of covenant, of promise; and that promise is envisioned primarily as something not yet fulfilled?The Promised Land, the Kingdom or the Commonwealth of God?something toward which we journey. Journey language is the language of transcendece, of moving beyond. Our desire to soar?is readily fused with the conviction of aliveness, a confidence of spirit. Thus our concepts of Spirit are inevitably linked to our yearning for transcendence, for crossing over, reaching beyond.

We feel we are not what we ought to be, hence we are not where we ought to be.

But I have only to put myself on that Apollo 8 space craft, right up at the porthole window in that vast immensity, making circles around the moon and watching the small blue marble that is our planet, to wonder where it is I think we are all really going.

Sitting down at the dinner table, which is where all good theology begins, I begin to come to terms with the directions of my own life: my recent pioneering move west, the ride off into the sunset that provided the closing credits for one part of my life, but gave little hint of what was next in store. The days and weeks pass and in about a month we will celebrate my installation as your ninth settled minister. As delighted and honored as I am to serve in this capacity, I have to say when the Finance Committee looked ?installation,? the agenda item that followed ?roof? and ?sound system,? I?m not surprised they asked about the windows rather than the new minister.

You see I?ve lost, and perhaps we?ve lost, the companion metaphor for journey and quest, the story dwelling and homemaking. Of settling not in its sense of settling ?for less? when more was on the menu; nor in its sense of creating settlements to lay heavy claim to disputed territories, but as in settling down, what one often does in order to raise up a family.

It cannot be avoided that the story of dwelling has most often been a woman?s story. Odysseus puts his oars to the waves; and it is Penelope who stays at home, weaving and unweaving at her loom, raising her son as a single mom while managing the household in her husband?s long absence.

Our culture counts upon women to soothe, to comfort, to heal, to connect, and to protect, writes Parks. Our culture also depends upon women to create, to invent, to find a way to hold things together?often against the odds. When women achieve this, they do so out of a profound strength, a strength of spirit which dwells at the heart of the religious impulse.

Home-making..is a connective, creative act of the human imagination and a primary activity of the Spirit. It is the creation of forms and patterns which cultivate and shelter life itself.

Alongside the great story of journey and quest, can we make space for the true wealth of metaphors that can encompasses the vast diversity of human experience? Not only the metaphor of journey and quest, but that of home-making and the richness of other ways of growing in wisdom and life experience?

In divinity school I sat in on a lecture about the landscape of religious literature, a wildly creative course with a reading list that zig-zagged through space and history, from the wayfaring of the Zen poet Basho to the fantastic adventures of the hobbit Bilbo. At the time I was just entering the third trimester of my pregnancy, and I found no words in these tales sufficient to my experience of sheltering a new life within me. As rich and rewarding at these stories are, they were not the right place to look to learn about that first journey, the path we all travel from womb to world.

Here is a journey measured in inches, not miles, but it is one of the most dangerous and exciting journeys we may ever take. And this, too, is shared story, one of growth and creation, of the deep learning that comes from where we already are, not where we think we ought to be.

Welcome not to the final frontier, but the first frontier: the circles we trace with our earliest caretakers between bed, rocking chair, bathtub. The little astronaut taking his first steps. The circles between school, home, church, shopping. The routes so familiar we wonder why our cars haven?t worn ruts along the avenues, like the covered wagons trundling over the Rockies. These are the countless rhythms of making a home that are given meaning not by completion but by repetition.

In Composing a Life, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bates, following in the footsteps of her mother Margaret Mead, writes about how women place the mosaic tiles and improvise the jazz lines of lives lived free of a single consuming goal, lives defined by the daily realities of multiple creative and competing demands and relationships. She writes,

Women are accustomed to tasks that have to be done again and again, tasks undone almost as soon as they are done. The dinner is eaten right after it is cooked, and there will be another dinner to think about tomorrow; the bed is unmade every night?Still?there is a special satisfaction to repetitive tasks that have an underlying, barely perceptible rhythm of change, such as washing and folding blue jeans that grow gradually larger over the course of a childhood, or preparing a dish that has been served over and over that suddenly provides the setting for newly mature conversation.

I find it hard to imagine the epic tale of the kitchen table, preserved for all the ages in Babylonian clay, but I think this represents more of a failure of my imagination than a judgment on this most familiar of stories. Surely it is and was a story familiar to all human communities, the story of dwelling and place-making, settling and abiding.

What are the stories you live by now, my spiritual friends? Have you cut yourself off, as our culture is busily doing, cutting itself off from the companion metaphors of journey and home, from the human reality of growth that comes both by seeking and dwelling?

It simply cannot be that growth is only something that happens out there, in the wilderness, on the quest, on the journey East or West. For the primary task before us, both women and men, writes Parks, is not that of becoming a fulfilled self? but rather to become a faithful people, members of a whole human family, dwelling together in our small planet home.

In a moment we will sing together our closing hymn, Peter Mayer?s Blue Boat Home, set to an older hymn tune you may find familiar. What I love about this hymn is how it combines our inescapable pilgrim human journey, the path we take from birth to death, with the image of the earth, our blue boat home, itself adrift and sailing through the universe. Perhaps you, too, will feel the waves rocking you safely in, gathering you into this shared home and welcoming you on our shared journey through the stars.

How much richer we when we come to know and value the capacity for human flourishing that emerges not only from the open road and the final frontier, from bold explorations and weary odysseys, but also from abiding in this place, from dwelling together in this house over the days and months and years it takes to grow and grow, from finding our imaginations stretched and expanded not only by our longing for transcendence, not only by our longing for transcendence, but from our belonging to one another.

May it be so.