"Lessons from the Road:
Part I"
A sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
July 19, 2009
READINGS ANCIENT AND MODERN:
Our first reading is an excerpt from the Book of Proverbs of
the Ancient Hebrew Scripture:
Wisdom calls aloud outside;
She raises her voice in the open squares.
She cries out in the chief concourses,
At the openings of the gates in the city
She speaks her words:
"How long… will you love simplicity?
…Surely I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you.
Our second reading is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a 20th
Century theologian and Lutheran Pastor in Germany. He was an active
participant in the German Resistance Movement against Nazism and
took part in an assassination attempt against Adolph Hitler:
To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events.
It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed
man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that
precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight
of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently
trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth
of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible
knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon
this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.
SERMON:
I was recently interviewed about my bicycle trip for a Public
Radio program called, "Spiritually Speaking," by Linda
Anderson of WVKR, the local NPR affiliate at Vassar College. Linda,
who is also a UU minister, asked me why I thought the theme of adventure
journeys was so popular in literature, in movies and in so many
genres. Why, she wondered, was it something so important to our
culture, and for me to undertake at this particular point in my
life?
For me, the adventure journey is a metaphor for life. In a short
and intense span of time the wanderer experiences countless occurrences,
opportunities and challenges that are something of a microcosm of
the larger journey that is life. They're metaphors within that larger
metaphor, all rolled up snugly to be discovered and appreciated
whenever they might be. Some of the metaphors are instantly quite
clear; others take a while to unpack.
Kriss Wells was one of my riding companions who often rode at the
same pace as I did. And so on several occasions we rode a good many
hours together. Sometimes we'd talk; sometimes not. Sometimes we
were profound; mostly we were not.
Sometimes I'd share out loud an observation of something I just
seen or noticed. Kriss would slowly mull the thought over in his
mind. And then very often he'd ask something like, "So, are
you really talking about that bridge back there, or are you speaking
metaphorically again?" Frequently that's when many of the metaphors
would leap out at me. Before they get lost by the way, I wanted
to share a few of these metaphors, these lessons from the road,
with you.
Albert Einstein once said that, "Life is like riding a bicycle.
To keep your balance, you must keep moving." I know that that's
a simile and not a metaphor, but still it leads to the thought that
- in order to have balance you must at least start moving.
So my first lesson from this journey really occurred before we
ever hit the road. When I began seriously contemplating even going
on this bicycle trip, I contacted our own world-class bicyclist,
Gary Sanderson. I knew that Gary had made the cross-country trip
and I wanted his advice. He shared lots of invaluable information
with me, but his best advice was this, "The most important
thing in planning a trip like this, Charlie, is deciding that you
are going to do it. Once you've made that decision," he said,
"everything else you do will get you ready for it. The most
important thing to know ahead of time is that you are going to do
it. You are going to make the trip!"
I remember deciding to get married. I remember choosing to become
a parent. I remember answering the call to ministry. I remember
so many decisions that I've made throughout my life that I couldn't
begin - ahead of time - to fathom all the implications of. There
was always one assumption that I could appreciate though, especially
in retrospect: whatever it was, the decision would not leave me
standing still. I would be moving. Moving leaves open the possibility
of falling down at any time along the way. Standing still though,
assures it immediately. Mahatma Gandhi put it this way, "You
may never know what results from your action, but if you do noth-ing
there will be no action."
Moving on… I've mentioned a number of times that at the beginning
of the trip I had lots of equipment issues. When I was in the midst
of all that, I wasn't even aware that the equipment was my problem.
That took a while to discover.
A couple of thoughts came to bear. First, I'd been assured by a
number of people in the know that, "Nobody is in the kind of
condition they need to be for a trip like this until about two weeks
into it." And second, was the old adage, "It's a poor
worker who blames his tools." So I expected the first couple
of weeks to be challenging, but my experience far exceeded those
expectations.
To say that I had equipment issues is to put it mildly. My bicycle
itself, is a Lynski, one of the best made in this country. However,
my riding shoes and pedals actually ended up injuring my feet. My
saddle, or bike seat, was particularly well suited for racing, but
not necessarily for long term touring; the thought of that narrow
little perch still brings a twinge of discomfort. There was also
a problem with oversized tires that occasionally rubbed against
the frame. Believe me; you don't want anything rubbing against anything
else, when you're riding those kinds of distances. The gearing on
my bike was very well set up for riding on flat lands or for racing,
but not necessarily for hours or days on end of climbing mountains.
So, I didn't know at first that these were the issues. I fully
trusted at the onset that I was not in good shape; I figured I needed
to tough it out for the first couple of weeks. Blaming my tools
was not an option, until I met a woman who ran a bike shop in Prescott,
Arizona. "You are really doing a lot of damage to your feet,"
she gasped as she looked into my shoes at the problem.
"Oh," I said. "Maybe we should take look at some
of this other stuff, too." Eventually I swapped out the shoes
and pedals, the tires and the seat. The gears I lived with. Things
im-proved substantially.
Sometimes in our lives we have great expectations of how things
are going to be and then our experiences bring us into a new relationship
with reality. If were going to stay upright and keep moving, we
have to adapt. If we fail to adapt, we may well cripple ourselves.
And sometimes in our lives, wise and generous people provide for
us access to what has worked well for them. We can learn a lot from
these wise and generous people, but we can't be them. What has worked
for them might or might not work for us at all. Perhaps what we
can learn from them though, are ways to discover what might work
well for us. That alone would be a huge gift.
19th Century transcendentalist and Unitarian, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
put it this way to the graduating seminarians in his Harvard Divinity
School address:
"Cast behind you all conformity and acquaint man, at firsthand,
with Deity. Go alone, refuse the good models and dare to love God
without mediator or veil. The time is coming when all…will
see that the gift of God to the soul is… a sweet, natural goodness…"
Moving on… It was the first afternoon of the trip. We were
pushing hard up the side of one of the San Marcos Mountains in western
California. You already know that I wasn't feeling in tip top shape.
I haven't really talked about what had been my number one anxiety
about the trip, though. It was traffic. I figured, one way or another,
that I could handle whatever challenges the road might offer. I
was not so confident in my ability to respond to threatening drivers.
So there we were, pedaling for all we were worth, up that winding
mountain road, when the driver of a semi truck decided to teach
me a lesson about bicycling in California. He literally blew past
me with less than an 18 inch margin. I don't know if you've ever
been on a bike that was passed by a big truck. The pull of gravity
that holds us to the earth is nothing in comparison to the suction
that pulls you toward a large fast-moving vehicle.
I could feel myself being pulled under the trailer. Immediately
I recognized three options. One, I could steer away from the truck
and into the rock filled ditch on the side of the road. Injury would
be certain with this option, but perhaps not as serious as it might
be if I fell in front of the rear tires of the truck. Two, I could
hold on as tightly as possible to my bike and to whatever ground
I had underneath me, fighting off, as best I could, the pull of
the draft that might take me under. Three, I could reach out with
my left hand and try to keep myself from the poll by pushing against
the truck and maintaining the distance of an arm's length. Injury
was not a certainty this way, but it did seem likely. I opted for
number two and I'm glad to be here to tell the tale.
How often in our lives, when faced with major challenges, do we
feel that we are being sucked in by forces beyond our control? The
truth probably is that the pull of those forces is beyond our control,
but our response to it is not. It's up to us. We may or may not
emerge from the situation unscathed, but whatever we choose to do,
we are determining outcomes that might impact on ourselves and those
around us for the rest of our lives.
British education consultant, Elaine Maxwell, writes, "My
will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be
no [one's] doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle
before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility;
win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny."
Before moving on too much further, I want to say a bit more about
drivers from the perspective of a bicyclist. From my view of biking
over 3,000 miles on the roadways of this country, there seem to
be three groups of drivers. The first and largest group includes
those drivers who see cyclists and do whatever they can to provide
adequate and safe space for them as they pass around. The range
within this group goes all the way from those who honk and wave
and shout encouragement to those who simply and quietly make their
way around.
The smallest group includes those drivers who also go well out
of their way for bikers, but who do so, like the semi driver in
California, in order to teach bikers a lesson. They cut their margins
short, if there is a margin at all. They also often honk and wave
and shout, but their gestures have a very different meaning.
The third group really doesn't go out of its way for cyclists in
any particular direction. In fact, it's as if they are unaware that
there are even cyclists on the road. They are sort of in their own
world, or on cell phones or whatever. They are less dangerous than
the second group, but still pose a serious threat to those of us
pedaling along the side of the road.
It strikes me that these three groups provide a good metaphor for
the theme of generosity. It's too easy to think that people fall
neatly into only one of these three categories. Although, I'm sure
many people who do typically fall into one or another of them.
Probably though, there are different times or even stages in our
lives when our generosity would be well described by any of the
three groups: One, generous and eager to share what we have; Two,
miserly and unwilling to give an inch or anything else; Three, self-absorbed
and unaware of the needs of the world and others around us. I have
to think that the larger good is well served when we are paying
attention and when we are being generous. I know bicyclists are
well served by attention and generosity. I think former First Lady
Barbara Bush got it right when she said, "Giving frees us from
the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the
unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others."
Moving on... Riding a bicycle in the mountains is unlike riding
anywhere else. You have to remember that I'm from the Midwest, the
land of enormous skies and endless horizons. That's not the way
it is in the mountains. In the mountains you're typically riding
either uphill or downhill. If you're riding downhill, the horizon
is generally some nadir where the road ceases to descend and begins
to ascend. If you're going uphill, chances are that the horizon
is not too far off in the distance, and that it includes a continuation
of uphill.
Climbing mountains on a bicycle is arduous. After a while, one
becomes assured that the re-mainder of their life, however long
it might be, will be spent pedaling uphill. A lesson that I recognized
I needed to learn fairly early on was that it was a waste of a perfectly
good experience to lament any occasional downhill stretches that
represented a loss in altitude, resulting in the need to re-climb
and reclaim my way back up through any mountain pass.
Let's say a pass is at 12,000 feet. It takes a lot of effort climb
1000 feet, by the way. Say you get up to 10,000 feet; you have 2,000
feet yet to go. You climb up around the next bend and find yourself
in a rapid descent of a couple thousand feet. Now here you are again,
4,000 feet below the pass and you start climbing all over.
So, I found myself loathing these drops in elevation until I recognized
that the elevation of the mountain pass had little to do with my
journey toward it. Those mountains existed a long time before I
arrived on the scene. The dips and rises were there and will stay
there for a long time to come. The rises are always going to be
a challenge. So, I had to learn to enjoy the down hills as the pleasant
side journey that they were. They weren't an encumbrance to climb;
they were merely a part of it. And besides, who's to say that the
mountaintop is the journey's end anyway?
Riding a bike through the mountains is much like walking a labyrinth.
If you've ever done that, you know that you quickly find yourself
heading for the final, central spot of the maze only to be carried
far away by a circuitous route that leads through considerably more
experience, before the center is ever finally reached.
Often when biking in the mountains, you are so sure that the rise
you're climbing is the one that leads to the top of the pass. You're
sure that you can clearly see that it is the very top of the mountain,
just ahead, just around the next bend... Then you make that turn
and see once more that you're going to be heading downhill before
going up further, or that there's what looks like, yes maybe, one
more rise yet to go. And so it goes...
This labyrinth aspect of my bicycle journey is one that comes into
play even at this very moment. I had fully expected (there's that
word again) at the onset of preparing this morning's message that
this would be the last of my bicycle trip sermons. At this point
though, I'm guessing that I'm at about the halfway mark of what
I had hoped to accomplish this morning. So my plan will be to pick
it up from here next week with, "Lessons from the Road: Part
II." I guess we'll have to see if that will indeed be the ultimate
missive.
To conclude this morning though, we might recognize that comparisons
of labyrinth-like biking in the mountains with life itself, are
hopelessly apparent. It really isn't over until it's over. And who
is to say, until we have some perspective of it all, whether the
most meaningful experiences are those moments spent in the heights
or in the depths of our being, or if they are in the transitions
between the two.
Poet Alvin Fein writes about life as such a journey:
Birth is a beginning
And death a destination
But life is a journey,
A going --- a growing
From stage to stage.
From Childhood to maturity
And youth to age.
From innocence to awareness
And ignorance to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion
And then perhaps to wisdom.
From weakness to strength
Or strength to weakness---
And, often back again.
From health to sickness
And back we pray, to health again.
From offense to forgiveness,
From loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude,
From pain to compassion,
And grief to understanding---
From fear to faith.
From defeat to defeat to defeat---
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey,
stage by stage
A sacred pilgrimage.
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