A few weeks ago now I attended three days of amazing words, music, thoughts, ideas, images, all of which I am still trying to integrate and process. I was privileged to be at a gathering where author and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor and poet and Celtic minister and wise man John Philip Newell spoke and held space for others to do the same. The days were so full and rich. It was like pulling a chair right up to a huge buffet, utensils in hand…..no plate, no tray…..just gorging myself on beautiful and profound words. Blessed and privileged reigned.
Several days after someone asked me how the event was and what I had really ‘gotten out of’ listening to people talk for that long a time. It was a legitimate question. I engaged this person in a conversation that moved to the question of why people go to these kinds of events. While we had a fun time in our talk, we both left somewhat unsatisfied, I think. 

But the conversation and the question has lingered with me. I have kept coming back to the intention of the question and trying to move toward some answer for myself. Why is it that we go to hear people we read, those we see as experts or teachers? Why do we, in the presence of those people, take copious notes, hanging on their every word? What is it we hope to find as we listen?

Perhaps we are ever-students. That is one reason. Perhaps we have a need to surround ourselves with people who might have ‘worked harder’ or ‘studied longer’. Perhaps we have the sense that if we can bask in their light we will not have to do our own work, our own study. These are all possibilities. But I have come to believe that we really attend events like this because we are trying to unlock the word search that is at work within us at all times. Mostly we walk around with one of those comic-strip bubbles above our heads waiting for our deepest thoughts and longings to find the right words that make sense of our living, our experience. We cannot do this work, most days, on our own. We need the company of strangers and friends to help us search out the words that listen us into our knowing. We need those people who have searched or stumbled onto the very words that form the deepest expressions that lay lodged within us.

Barbara Brown Taylor has done much thoughtful work about the role darkness plays in our unfolding spiritual quests. “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”, she writes in Learning To Walk in the Dark. This speaks to my experience though I might not have been able to say it so poetically or truthfully. And coming from a faith tradition and a culture that values so strongly light over darkness this is wisdom to treasure.

Watching the unfolding news of all those fleeing this week from the lands in which they were born, hoping to find welcome, hoping to find a new place of belonging, I am struck with an awesome humility. Listening to our country and all the others try to make sense of what this welcome looks like and how it will be offered, I wish I could have searched out these words of John Philip Newell’s that would be ready on my lips:

To the home of peace

to the field of love

to the land where forgiveness and right relationship meet

we look, O God,

with longing for earth’s children

with compassion for the creatures

with hearts breaking for the nations and people we love.

Open us to visions we have never known

strengthen us for self-givings we have never made

delight us with a oneness we could never have imagined

that we may truly be born of You

makers of peace.

We spend our lives roaming in a giant word search puzzle. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it well…..“No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.” 

I am thankful to these two wise ones for the wisdom they have offered me, for the way their words have awakened something sleeping within my spirit. May this day have us finding the words we need. And may we even find that they are our own.