Sacred Place Worship Series 7, September 25, 2016, "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes".

Sacred Place 7 Exodus 17.1-7, Isaiah 35:1-2, Isaiah 2,2 BFC 2016

Exodus 17:1-7, Isaiah 35:1-2, Isaiah 2:2

September 25, 2016[1]

          We just emerged from the summer months, each named to convey that Rome was the center of the world, the arbiter of time:  June after the Roman goddess Juno who was the protector of all Rome; July after Julius Caesar, posthumously identified as divine, a god, resurrected in the form of a comet, the Roman politician perhaps most responsible for the demise of the Roman republic and the rise of the Roman empire; and finally, August, named after Julius’ adopted son, Augustus Caesar, referred to as the son of god.  When I candidated at this church, a little more than two years ago, I shared liturgy that spoke of Caesars and their time-keeping, offered an alternative to an imperial clock. I tried to juxtapose the marking of time done by Native American people, referencing the strawberry moon—the calendar worked out in according to relationship with the earth and the living and growing—with one that lauded the violence, oppression, and death of empire.    

          It is one of the reasons I mention the time in the liturgical year every Sunday when I welcome you to worship and teach the liturgical calendar to our children during my time with them in worship.  Abiding by that liturgical calendar is a small, simple way that I remind us of being called to live in alternative time, a countercultural calendar that is not marked by Rome. 

          As a young pup in Christianity, I was very critical of those who chose to live a monastic or cloistered life.  I saw it as cowardice, a retreat from the real world.  I was critical, that is, until I learned the origin story of monasticism.  That origin story begins with the Roman Emperor Constantine who looks out over his vast and diverse empire and sees that diversity as a problem to be rectified under his rule.  Recognizing that religion can be a great unifier, Constantine asked himself whether he should make the Mithras, the religion of the Roman military and the rural areas, the official religion of Rome.   Or should he choose this burgeoning religion in Rome’s urban centers, Christianity, the official religion?  He chooses Christianity, uniting the empire under one God.  And the Roman Empire becomes the Holy Roman Empire. 

As we learned last year during the Jesus Seminar, Constantine found the diversity of Christian beliefs to be antithetical to his program and plan.  So he convened a Council at the city of Nicaea that this Christian faith could be assimilated under a singular banner of belief.  Just to push the unity program a bit, Constantine slowly removed the food supply of the gathered scholars and theologians at Nicaea.  They, in turn, produced the Nicaean Creed.  Let the burning of the heretics begin!  I thought about doing that with our visioning dinners, but Tracy thought it might be a little heavy-handed.  And besides, I don’t have an imperial army at my disposal. 

Not all Christians in the 4^th Century greeted the news that Christianity had now become Christendom with great joy.  Some of them thought that a Christianity which rose to partner with the domination systems and structures of the day could no longer retain Christianity’s central identity.  This religious faith, that had once disagreed over whether the military could be included under the tent of Christian faith, now became the faith that conquered and dominated other peoples and lands.  Bishops appointed by Constantine ruled over what were effectively military districts.  The religion of Christ crucified became the crucifier. 

So there were Christians who left their newly found status of being the “winners” in history to the obscure and forgotten fierce landscapes of the desert, the wilderness, the mountain, and the island.  Life would not be easy in these places.  But here monastic communities were founded to provide an alternative to Roman power and opulence, Roman brutality and militarism, and the Roman clock and calendar.

As some Christians walked away from Rome into these fierce landscapes of desert, wilderness, island, and mountain, they experienced a simplicity, a bare-boned honesty that did not allow them to forget who they were.  The early monastics were thus reminded of their heritage as people of faith, the Children of Israel walking hand in hand out into the wilderness to begin their love story with God.  In that fierce landscape, the Children of Israel were stripped of the values, practices, and habits of Egypt and what it means to Egyptian slaves so they could, in all humility, remember who they were and are as The Children of God. 

There is an indifference to the wilderness or desert that does not get us caught up in striving for wealth, power, and influence.  It just does not care and is not caught up in our spiritual games.  As writer and environmental activist, Edward Abbey wrote, the desert, “Would as soon kill ya as look at ya.”[2]  Fierce landscapes leave us bare, allow nothing to get in the way of our relationship with the wild and free God, strip us of all pretense.

Montana cowboy poet Wallace McRae writes out of the desert of the western plains a poem called, “Reincarnation” which reveals the rugged indifference fierce landscapes have to the anxiousness of our egos.  He writes: 

What does reincarnation mean?
A cowpoke ast his friend.
His pal replied, "It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box
Away from life's travails.

The box and you goes in a hole,
That's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside
And then yore just beginnin' on
Yer transformation ride.

In a while the grass'll grow
Upon yer rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lovely flower is found.
And say a horse should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now's become
Yer vegetative bower.

The posey that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed.
But some is left that he can't use
And so it passes through,
And finally lay upon the ground.
This thing, that once wuz you.

Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life, and death, and such,
And come away concludin': Slim,
You ain't changed all that much.[3]

The desert simply won’t allow us to take ourselves too seriously.  We come to fierce landscapes with all of our self-importance and anxious needs, and they could care less.  The wilderness ignores us.  British explorer Andrew Harvey says, "We often are saved in the end by the things that ignore us."[4]

In writing about the way of the desert monastics, their spiritual path, Laura Swan shares that apatheia is "the goal of the desert journey."[5]   In all of the great Christian spiritual tradition which advances the values of balance and freedom, practices of prayer, solidarity, fasting, and detachment, apatheia is the word that captures the length and breadth of the spiritual journey. A word with such length and breadth cannot be easily defined. Apatheia has been translated as "purity of heart", "detachment and solidarity", "freedom", "indifference", "disinterested love", "love without seeking reward", and, finally, "apathetic love."  Apatheia is the opposite of passive-aggressive.  It does not bargain or put on a show. 

As Laura Swan shares, apatheia is about developing a listening ear to hear God’s voice speak below and around the din of so many voices in our culture. The early monastics looked at the geography of the mountain or the desert and saw a spiritual geography. The desert or mountain had incredible gifts to bring as fierce landscapes. For those gifts to appear, however, one had to stay with the mountain or desert for a time. The landscape had to get under your skin and into your blood.  One had to develop an attentiveness and a listening ear that may have been blunted by the onslaught of messages within the empire.  And though we may entreat fierce landscapes, they will not change. They are indifferent to our pleas. Their love, their gifts, is (are) offered out of who they are at their core. The mountain or desert is not moving as we might in a co-dependent relationship.

Love is this way. It does not offer its gifts quickly. Love gently and slowly reveals its nature over time. Time must be spent with love. And love will not jump or shout or move in an effort to appease.  In learning to ignore the unimportant, to be stripped bare of priorities which only act as hurdles and hedges against a direct encounter with the Living God, we find that we are then also loved more fiercely than we could ever imagine.  And lo and behold, the path is made straight and the desert begins to bloom in ways we just begin to notice.

Rabi’a al-Adawiya, female Muslim Sufi mystic from Basra (ca. 713-801 C.E.), in what is modern day Iraq, invited people to the practice of apatheia. She once walked along a street in Basra, holding a torch in one hand and a pail of water in the other. Asked why, she replied, “I want to put fire to paradise and pour water over hell so that these two veils disappear and it becomes plain who venerates God for love and not for fear of hell or hope for paradise.”[6]

In the end, that is what apatheia is all about. It is the sum of solidarity and detachment, prayer and fasting, that leads to a freedom to love for love's own sake. We love God not for return or reward but because we have fallen in love with the character, the very essence of God.

This is the solace of fierce landscapes, so necessary in our time, so important while there is so much that requires our attention, seeks to distract us, and bargains for something less than the essential.  As teacher and author, Belden C. Lane writes,

People who pay attention to what matters most in their lives, and who learn to ignore everything else, assume a freedom that is highly creative as well as potentially dangerous in contemporary society. Having abandoned everything of insignificance, they have nothing to lose. Apart from being faithful to their God, they no longer care what happens to them.[7]

That freedom is dangerous to those in the world who believe they control the world’s calendar and believe we can be controlled through our anxiousness and fear and our attention to baubles and trinkets.  Rather, our sacred spaces have shaped us, and we have become fierce lovers of the Divine and the world that God loves with an intensity we are just beginning to know.

             May our fierce landscapes mold and shape us so that we develop alternative rhythms and calendars, countercultural lives so we stop sucking on the tailpipe of Empire, and an attentiveness which begins to make us aware of the wild and free and fierce love of God.  Amen.

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[1]The book by Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:  Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), is really the basis for this sermon.  I find it to be the most spiritually compelling book I have ever read.

[2] Belden C. Lane, “Desert Indifference, Desert Love,”  30 Good Minutes:  Chicago Sunday Evening Club, April 21, 1996.  http://www.30goodminutes.org/index.php/archives/23-member-archives/450-belden-c-lane-program-3928.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Laura Swan, O.S.B., "Wise Elders and the Desert Traditions," Obsculta!

[6] Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry:  Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis:  Augsburg Fortress, 2001), p. 35, quoting Annemarie Schimmel, Mystiche Dimensionen des Islam: Die Geschichte des Sufismus [Munich, 1992], pp. 65-66.

[7] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:  Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 193.