Sermon
One of the most exciting experiences of being alive is being seized by the call to adventure; being seized by the desire to leave the familiar, the safety and security of home, the comfort of known and venture out into the unknown. I had my first powerful experience of this kind of adventure in the fall of 1977 at the age of 20 years old. Early Friday morning, October 7th, I bought an Amtrak rail pass in Newark, Delaware, said good-bye to my family and boarded a train for the West Coast. That very day I began a journal of my experiences which I reread this past week to reconnect with who I was 20 years ago. Here is the first paragraph I wrote:
This is the day. Last Friday evening I decided to go to California. All this fall I have been restless and depressed. There were many causes I suppose, no free time, my health, no sex life, families' recent troubles with my mother's health, losing Mike, my best friend, to Erhard's Seminar Training or EST, seeing my freedom deteriorating. These and many other factors hit me at the Rustler's Steak House on Kirkwood Highway. Suddenly, California seemed to be the only place to go. Ever since I became employed [as a summer hire] by Hewlett Packard three summers ago I had dreamed of California. My Mecca was Palo Alto, H.P.'s corporate headquarters.
I had just arranged a six month leave of absence from the University of Delaware where I was starting my junior year of electrical engineering. Even though I boarded the train that morning not knowing where I would end up, I did have friends along the way to visit in Athens, Ohio, Madison, Wisconsin, and Wenatchee, Washington. I almost stopped my journey in Corvallis, Oregon but it was too much like the University town in which I grew up. I wanted to see and be part of what was soon to be called the Silicon Valley.
The pull to adventure can be very strong. Imagine yourself as a fisher tending to your nets on a beach. You have been out fishing all night and caught nothing. Then a man of great personal magnetism appears on the beach and sends you out to fish in the very same spot you were fishing but this time you catch so many fish, your boat almost sinks under their weight. In your astonishment, this man challenges you to join him, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men." Powerful leaders can kindle the spark of adventure in us and lead us into unknown waters to fish for a new kind of catch.
And sometimes the call to adventure becomes heroic. Did some of you catch the PBS special on the Lewis and Clark expedition this past week? They responded to the call of President Thomas Jefferson to seek a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean up the mighty Mississippi river drainage basin. Their expedition, they mentioned, had the same kind of excitement and drama as the first trip to the moon did. Few expected them to return after they were gone for such a long time.
The hero's journey is one of the universal human themes of legend, story and sacred text. Joseph Campbell, the well known mythologist, sees the call to adventure coming in two forms:
One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of spiritual life and then comes back with a message.[1]
For Campbell, the hero's journey is a component of our more ordinary existence. If we were able to communicate with the newly fertilized egg, it's journey into babyhood would certainly qualify, says Campbell, as a great passage of transformation. At different ages of our development, marked today by developmental psychologists as we pass through major life milestones such as puberty, adulthood, marriage, family, the empty nest, menopause and retirement, the call to adventure can seize us. Too often these life changes are frustrated because they aren't honored and the transformational energy they release in us to find new meaning for our lives isn't recognized.
20 years ago I was in one of those moments of life change. 20 years ago, I was ready to stop being a boy and become a man.
Since that time, the adventure has continued. I did find a job as an electronic technician working for Hewlett Packard, not in Palo Alto though but rather in Cupertino about 25 miles to the south and stayed in California. After about a year, I realized that I wanted to finish my electrical engineering degree and continued my adventure at the University of California at Berkeley rather than returning home to Delaware. My original plan was to return to work for HP after I graduated but was excited by the opportunity to work for a small micro-computer manufacturer who looked like a promising rival to Apple computers: NorthStar Computers. When NorthStar began to fail after IBM entered the now renamed personal computer or PC market, I thought it might be time to return to Hewlett Packard and even got a job offer. But the call to adventure still held me and this is when I decided to go to seminary.
The most recent call to adventure was to come down here to Florida to serve this little Fellowship in Port Charlotte which was betting that the congregation could grow enough to support full time ministry in the fall of 1993. And after four years, even though we aren't out of the woods just yet, last year we were able to balance the budget and expect to do it again this year. We have worked together to prove that Charlotte County can have a successful Unitarian Universalist ministry.
While this congregation has much growing yet to do to better serve its members and the Unitarian Universalists who will be discovering us in the next few weeks, months and years, I'm now wondering what the call to adventure has in store for me next. Seeing that every two to four years my life seems to have a big change in it, kind of makes me wonder if the pattern will continue.
And on Monday night, I had a dream.
I remember clearly only the end of this dream. It must have been a good one because Philomena reported to me that I was laughing in my sleep. I'm in a conference room with two men I don't recognize - except one of them seems to be a friend of mine who is encouraging me to do business with the other. The new fellow is your typical optimistic salesman who is encouraging me to invest with him and promising me the moon. I'm feeling good about the salesman and almost ready to conclude our discussion and sign up with him. As an afterthought, I ask him, how much this is going to cost me. He pauses and says, "That depends."
Well I get upset with him. "What do you mean it depends?" I respond. "If you trade stocks, you know what the commission is. If you sell real estate, you know how much you will owe the broker. You don't know the price you will get but you do know what it will cost you."
Then the salesman asks me, "When was the last time you were in Sacramento?" Well it so happens I live on Sacramento Avenue so I've been there a lot. But in the dream I associate it with Sacramento, the state capital of California. The salesman goes on to tell me that they are doing things differently there now and business practices are changing. I'm leery now of whether I want to work with him given the fact he is asking for so much trust in him and for me to take a big risk, but we continue talking to each other until I wake up.
The key to this dream seems to be the word `Sacramento.' It is Spanish for `sacrament.' The word sacrament derives from the Latin, sacramentum which originally was the oath a Roman soldier took to Rome. The Roman Catholic church borrowed this powerfully loaded word for a solemn obligation or commitment, and used it to describe the obligations of a Christian. The official seven Catholic sacraments are baptism, confirmation, communion, confession, marriage, holy orders, and extreme unction or the ceremony of anointing the sick with oil for healing commonly called last rites.
The dream suggests that the old ways of doing things are being changed and giving way to new ways. Certainly this is true in the business world where the rapid changes that have come with the information revolution and our movement toward a service based economy which makes use of mental rather than physical energy to acquire wealth. I've noticed that the business world leads in generating the shifting paradigms which the religious world later uses in expressing eternal truths. I wondered if this is happening in my dream as well.
At forty years old, married with child and graying hair, I'm solidly now in middle age. I have a profession to which I am seriously committed. I serve on a number of committees, boards and organizations advancing positive social goals. My commitment to my religious life requires daily expenditure of energy. My path of adventure has led me to a number of self imposed limits on my freedom. I'm not about to jump up and run off to California again.
I think this is a common experience of the aging process. As we get older, we don't have the same kinds of freedom we do when we are young. For some this means they don't have the money they did to play with when they worked. For some their health begins to give way and limits what they can do. For some the mind isn't as supple and reliable as it was when they were young. For some their energy and stamina has dwindled. Their access to adventure appears to be diminished.
Indeed adventure, as Campbell spoke of it, to accomplish the great feat in battle or overcome some great physical obstacle may no longer be possible. But there remains another kind of adventure which takes the person on an inward journey.
Like the outer adventure, exploring the inner caverns of the mind can be risky. The rate of return is uncertain and the cost may be hard to calculate. On the inner adventure, one is likely to confront fears which are very unpleasant. The desire to run away from the imprint of the past that remains in our bodies is strong. But with courage and perseverance, the inner adventure leads to discoveries. New experiences lead to new understanding. New awareness leads to new sensitivity. The inward journeyer expands their consciousness as they discover the vistas of our universe not readily available in ordinary consciousness.
One of the safeguards on the inner adventure which works to open the way to discovery are the commitments we make, the solemn obligations we feel, the sacraments we observe. While most of us would be uncomfortable with the form of the sacraments as taught by the Catholic church, the sacraments, our feelings of solemn obligation, are an important bond which ties us together.
My dream figure is telling me that the source of my assurance in the risk taking we will do together will be our shared sacraments. These sacraments are changing. They are not the ones we've had in the past. We live in a new world. But recognizing and honoring them will be the way we can work together and build trust.
A great deal is at stake. And when the inner transformative adventure meets the outer world, great things can happen.
When the inner drive to create meets human feeling, needs, desires, fears, hatreds, questions, dreams, and hopes, a call goes out for adventure.
When an inner wound is opened, still damp with old blood and meets an invitation to personal growth, to let go of old habits, patterns and attitudes, to forgive and reconcile old wrongs, a call goes out for adventure.
When the inner sense of justice, which springs from a compassionate awareness of our connection with others, meets the many faces of evil recognized by its path of destruction rather than though by an affirmation of life, a call goes out for adventure.
To take up this call is a free choice, a choice which can then be support by the sacraments, the commitments of religious life.
So after 20 years, my outer adventure leaving home for California has been gradually transformed into an inner journey lived today as my ministry. And let me tell you, working with a congregation at times feels as much like an adventure as the day I stepped on the train that bright October morning.
For me, the sacraments which guide and guard my way are a commitment to loving people, a commitment to listening to and acting with discernment from deepening my understanding of the inner guidance which directs me, and a commitment to living religiously and choosing adventure.
The seeds for these commitments are planted within all of us, perhaps even planted several generations back, perhaps planted in us by the sea of Galilee, perhaps in the Garden of Eden, perhaps in an amino acid soup. As I reread the journal I kept of my travels, I came across intriguing signs foreshadowing future changes in my life. One section in particular, I wanted to share with you this morning, was written on October 24th after visiting the Van Halms in San Jose, the Dutch landlords of my parents during the first year of their marriage. My father was a Fulbright Scholar in Holland after getting his Phd. in Chemistry. During my visit with them, they insisted on showing me the bed on which had been conceived 21 years before. The journal entry comes while reflecting on our conversation about the Nazi's resurgence in the area.
I get so depressed talking about the world today because I don't know what I can do. I know in my heart the Nazi's are bad but should I let them have free speech? Where does one draw the line or should one be drawn? Can anything good come from something so vile? I cannot go into battle without some commitment in my heart. These are questions I cannot answer [now] and, therefore, I can lead no one. There is only one thing I can see as the right course. To lead a moral life always being true to one's self and one's principles. To lead a life that, if it suddenly came to an end tomorrow, I could say, "I would not change one act and would gladly repeat it." Perhaps this is the most difficult task of all. I cannot say I have done this but I can say I have tried...I can do nothing but set an example. Perhaps in this way I can prevent a few souls from straying.
I find it fascinating to hear in my budding moral discourse, a minister looking for way to flower and also to hear my early sense that the key component missing, holding me back in my life, is sacrament, is a solemn commitment.
I don't know what I'm saying today of which I will look back on in 20 years and recognize as the initial shoots of an idea, a way of being, an adventure, peeking out of the ground. Whatever it might be, I hope, in some small way, it will open the path to a greater adventure of the mind, heart and spirit for those who come next.
Copyright (c) 1997 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.
[1] Moyers, Bill, Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth, Doubleday,, 1988