Pilgrimage 4:  On the Path
Rev. Mark Hayes
Spiritual sharing by Marian Dornell
January 6, 2002

Reading:   “The Path of Practice”  by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
   (from Spiritual RX: Prescriptions for Living a Meaningful Life)

     Spiritual literacy is the ability to recognize the presence of the sacred in our everyday experiences. ... Spiritual practices both support this perspective and enable us to act upon it.  They help us move into deeper relationships with God, our true selves, other people, and the whole Creation.  They are how we live a spiritual life every day.

     Practice has always been the heart and soul of the world’s religions, and it is also the distinguishing characteristic of today’s less organized spirituality movements.  It can be something as simple as lighting a candle or a ritual as complex as a Native American vision quest.  It can involve the spontaneity of a Christian’s flash prayers in the street or the rigorous structure of a Muslim’s five-times-a-day prayer.  It is Africans and Sufis expressing their yearning for God through dance, Jews studying the Torah, Buddhists doing mindfulness meditation, and Hindus looking for divine signs in common objects. . .

     Many of us . . . were raised to think of spiritual practice as little more than a short grace before meals, saying bedtime prayers, and going to a weekly worship service.  The problem with seeing practice this way is that it becomes just another entry on our already crowded To Do lists, one of those frequently unexamined routines of our daily lives.  Practice degenerates into an onerous obligation similar to taking out the garbage or flossing our teeth.

     A far more useful and rewarding approach is to view practice not as an activity we do but as a path we travel on our spiritual journey.  It is our way of experiencing spiritual reality.  Practice is and always has been here; it is a path with no beginning and no end.  We just have to step into it.  And, although practice does not require that we leave the realms of reason and sense perceptions, it gives us a much broader base to operate from.

     This means that everything we do is practice.  As the Zen Buddhists put it, how you do anything is how you do everything.  Walking down the hall mindfully is as important as sitting on the mat in meditation.  How a Christian acts at work on Monday is as significant as attendance at church on Sunday. . .
 Spiritual practices (plural), then, are the concrete acts we perform on the path of practice.

Spiritual Journey Sharing:  Marian Dornell
    What a journey I’d have missed if I had chosen my own path!  Although I couldn’t have known it at the time, my spiritual path chose me, and I very reluctantly stepped onto it the fall of 1979.  At that time, the first of our five kids was about to leave the nest, with three others perched to follow very quickly.  Most of them wanted to go to college.  So did I.

    Since the early 70’s I’d worked as an instructional aide in special education both on Long Island and Vermont.  I was drawn to those kids and appreciated their ability to adapt and compensate for a situation over which they had no control.  I could relate to their circumstance.  It was a challenge to motivate them and their successes became little triumphs for me.  I was encouraged by specialists in the field to pursue special ed as a career.

     However the financial strain of paying for six years’ worth of education for me while putting kids through college, made for an impractical dream to pursue.  It was tough, but I let it go.  However, I knew that if I didn’t soon figure what else I could be when I grew up, my opportunity for a college education would pass me by. So I made a somewhat informed, half-hearted decision to go into nursing.  Before marriage and children, I had entertained the notion of doing something in health care.  My mother had been a nurse and while I’d loved listening to her stories, I was sure I didn’t have the interest or commitment to pursue such a career.

     We were living in Shelburne, VT, in 1979, and by then I’d discovered that the University of Vermont in Burlington, had both a two- and a four-year nursing program.  The two-year program was created primarily for licensed practical nurses and emergency medical technicians living in rural Vermont who wanted to become registered nurses.  In other words, it was mostly for people who had some knowledge of and experience in patient care – skills that I didn’t have.

     In my application, I tried to write an essay to declare my devotion to  nursing, but for every essay I wrote, I found a new reason to express my passion for the symphony of fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.  If Eddie hadn’t written that essay for me, there’d be a different ending to this story.  Yes, fibbing is a part of my spiritual journey.

     Anyway, let me tell you about my first week in nursing school as a forty year-old in 1979.  At a “welcoming” luncheon for new nursing students, the dean took one look at me and assessed that I would probably need “lots and lots of tutors” to get me through the “tough two-year program”.  Was it coincidence, then, that the next day I flunked my very first college exam?  To top it off, later that week, I heard myself say to my nursing instructor, “You expect me to put this tube where?”

     Well, I did manage to survive my first year.  I was intrigued at the challenge offered by inspiring and nurturing professors to provide holistic care for sick people in a health care system that fragmented body from mind from spirit.  This was similar to the way I perceived how some of my special ed kids were experienced by their classroom teachers and parents: that their learning disabilities were distractions to complain about rather than a challenge to help the kids to rise up to and surmount. This tiny commonality nudged me along on my journey as a nursing student.  By the way, I proved the dean’s assessment of me wrong.  Instead of needing tutors, I became  part of a peer tutoring system that helped other students who had faltered along the way.  And on graduation day it was a pleasure to receive from “Herself” an award for my classroom and clinical achievement.  But that’s not the end of my story.

     I was very unhappy and unfulfilled working as a staff nurse, first in VT, then in MD.  After a number of years I began to feel like a robot.  There was very little to sustain me until I, or I should say, until hospice nursing found me.  I’ll save that for another story.

     During those lean years I read and reread a journal entry I’d written after my first day of clinical at the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont while I was in nursing school.  I’ll conclude by sharing that with you this morning.

 “January 20, 1980.  My first day as a student at the Medical Center. As I helped my confused patient orient herself, to fill her space and time, she became my compass.  Her questioning eyes directed me.  Where am I going? What do I want?  Do I serve myself by serving others?  Is this fear, this unknowingness self-actualization?  Is this what I want?  The compass dial flutters slightly.  Am I on course?  Does this unsettled feeling go along with a dream come true, a journey’s end?
 “The journey never starts, never ends.  It is.  I am.  How shall I fill my space, my time?  I want to flee, but the course that my compass has chosen for me will not release me now.  I am committed.  I am drawn by a force that will not let me wander.  I stumble.  I fall.  I continue.  I look into her eyes as she looks into mine.  We ask, we reply, we comfort each other.  Together.  One step at a time.”

     Today I’d like to talk about the experience of actually being “on the path” – the path that is our life and our quest for spiritual growth and fulfillment. When I talked about preparing for the journey, I noted that the distinction between the journey and the preparation for the journey is artificial.  Preparation is a part of the trip, and doesn’t end at the moment of entering the path.

    As I talk about life on the path, I’m really talking about continuing those preparations and building on them.  I’m talking about maintaining a state of attentiveness, of mindfulness, lest we miss important landmarks along the way.  The focus today is on the journey itself, and not on the destination.  I assert that the true value of life is in the living, not in what, if anything, comes at the end of life.

     And so I’m concerned with how to enhance the journey.  How to make it enjoyable, and productive, and enriching to mind, body and spirit.  I am becoming ever more convinced that one important key to a fulfilling journey is discipline, in the form of intentional practice.  And I mean practice here in the sense that the Brussats spoke of in our reading this morning.  That is, practice that infuses every minute of every day.

    I can set aside time each day for prayer, for being in intentional communion with the deepest inner core of myself.  I can practice mindfulness through meditation once or more every day.  But my goal is for my whole life to be my prayer.  To be continually mindful everywhere I go, and in everything I do.  To maintain a level of attention that keeps me consciously connected to my surroundings, to life itself.  I don’t want to sleepwalk my way through life.  I want to be awake.

    To stay awake, to remain ever attentive, requires discipline.  And so I choose the path of practice.  But you know, one of the nice things about choosing such a path is that it doesn’t mean signing on to someone else’s detailed scheme or agenda.  There are indeed many paths – many forms of practice.  In fact, the Brussats, in the book Spiritual RX describe thirty-seven specific categories of practice.  They include beauty, devotion, forgiveness, imagination, openness, play, silence, and wonder, just to name a few.

    I’ve already spoken a bit about one of their categories; that is, attention or mindfulness – that quality of alertness and awareness that keeps us from missing the trees for the forest.  There are three other areas of practice that I’d like to explore a little further this morning.  Those are connections, compassion, and justice.

    I select connections because, for me, that lies at the very heart of spiritual life and experience.  According to the Brussats, one definition of spirituality is “the art of making connections.”  I have often used a very similar definition; namely, recognizing and experiencing already existing connections, both visible and invisible.

    The key to centering spiritual practice around the notion of connections is the realization that everything is related to everything else.  The one is made up of the many.  You practice connections by consciously tracing the ties linking you with other beings, as well as ties linking other beings with each other.

    A part of such practice might be noticing – paying attention to – signs and symbols of connectedness all about you.  For instance, examining the wonder of a spider’s web might remind you of the web of life that connects you with everything.  Looking out an airplane window might remind you that the lines that separate one locality from another are artificial.  Your practice might include reflecting on those connections that are most important in defining your life, whether it be to a specific place, or to certain people, or to some aspect of the natural world.

    One great gift of the practice of connections is the realization that you are not alone.  Writer Stephen Mitchell claims that “The point of all spiritual practice is to wake up from the dream of the separate self.”  We are all in this together.  As essayist Scott Russell Sanders puts it, “There are no backwaters.  There is only one river, and we are all in it.  Wave your arms, and the ripples will eventually reach me."  I truly believe that the practice of connections is central to spiritual life.

    The second category of practice I’d like to consider is compassion.  Actually, I see the practice of compassion as a natural response to the sense of connection that I’ve been talking about.  Since we are all connected, then the suffering of others becomes our own suffering.  And so we are moved to act so as to relieve suffering wherever we find it.  That is the essence of the practice of compassion.

    As in any practice, there is always room for continuing growth and development.  Cultivating a practice of compassion requires seeing, and listening, and reflecting on the nature of the suffering we encounter.  And it requires starting with yourself.  Helen M. Luke says, “The feeling of wishing to save the world comes very often out of a wish to escape from having compassion on your own darkness, for what is inside yourself.  If you don’t start there, you will never have true compassion.”

    So the first step is to allow yourself to feel the suffering in the world, including your own, and then to move, not away from pain, but toward it, with caring.  As your practice continues, you may find your circle of compassion expanding to include not only yourself, your friends and neighbors, but also other creatures, all of nature, even the inanimate world.

    To act with compassion is to live out the realization of our place in the interdependent web of all existence.  As the teacher, Pema Chodron says, “True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.”  Compassion is indeed a natural outgrowth of our sense of connections.

    The next area of spiritual practice, the practice of justice, continues to build on what has come before.  If we practice compassion in an effort to relieve suffering, we practice justice in order to prevent suffering.  We do that by identifying and addressing the systemic roots of pain and injustice.

    One way we practice justice is by demanding it.  We name injustices when we see them.  We work to insure that all people, especially the poor and the weak, have access to opportunities.  This is how we truly affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  And again, our yearning for justice grows naturally out of our sense of connectedness with all of existence, and our understanding that none of us is truly free until all of us are.

    As with compassion, the practice of justice does not begin with saving the whole world – “out there.”  It must start closer to home.  Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund writes, “We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make, which, over time, add up to big differences we cannot foresee.”

Along with our practice of justice, must come the discipline of patience and the faith that our efforts will bear fruit.  And if we practice diligently, even if we don’t change the world as we wish, we are sure, at least, to change ourselves for the better.

    One reason I chose to focus on compassion and justice this morning is because of the All-Congregation Social Action meeting that follows this service.  That gathering provides us, as a religious community, with the opportunity to consider the practice of compassion and justice.  We can reflect on what we have done as individuals and as a congregation.  And we can explore ways of expanding the practice, and thus cultivating further those aspects of our spiritual growth.  I encourage you to stay for the meeting and to explore some possibilities for putting your faith into action.

    I’ve drawn quite heavily this morning from the book, Spiritual RX, but I’ve barely scratched its surface.  I recommend it to you if you want to pursue these ideas further.  One more thing I would like to share from it is a number of general tips for life on the path of practice.

    “Feel welcome: this is common ground.” Whoever you are, and wherever you find yourself, there is room for you on the path of practice.  Everyone belongs.

    “Be discerning.  Not all spiritual practices are for everyone.  Know yourself, and look for the ones that are right for you.”

    “Be flexible.  Try not to be rigid or unbending, for this saps your spirit and deters you from enjoying the surprises along the way.”

    “Learn from others.  You are not the first on the path of practice. . . Listen to those with more experience.”

    “Don’t have expectations.  Taking up the path of practice is a way of weaning ourselves from expectations.”

    “Work with who you are.  Practice yields a rigorous and rewarding form of self-knowledge.  The challenge is to honor the best and the worst in ourselves.”

    And, finally, “Come down off the mountain.  Our practices can be rejuvenated by dramatic mountaintop experiences that give us fresh energy and bold perspectives.  but eventually we must return to the realities of our everyday lives.  The path of practice is the ordinary way.  It is daily life.”

    I’d like to close this morning with a story that I think illustrates some of the best qualities of following the path of practice.  It’s one of those stories that makes the rounds on email, and the version I received said the author was unknown.  A little research, however, uncovered the author’s name.  The story is “The Daffodil Principle” by Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards.

    Edwards tells of her daughter’s repeated urgings to come visit her and see the daffodils.  Edwards finally relents and makes the two-hour drive to her daughter’s house, but refuses to go any further because of the rain and fog in the mountains.  The daughter, Carolyn, tricked her mother into the car and drove her to see the daffodils anyway, assuring her it would be worth it.  Edwards writes:
 

     We got out of the car and . . . I followed Carolyn down the path.  Then, we turned a corner, and I looked up and gasped.

    Before me lay the most glorious sight.  It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it down over the mountain peak and slopes.  The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns – great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, saffron, and butter yellow.  Each different-colored variety was planted as a group so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue.

    There were five acres of flowers.  “But who has done this?” I asked Carolyn.

    “It’s just one woman,” Carolyn answered.  “She lives on the property.  That’s her home.” . . .
    We walked up to the house.  On the patio, we saw a poster. “Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking” was the headline.

    The first answer was a simple one.  “50,000 bulbs,” it read.  The second answer was “One at a time, by one woman.  Two hands, two feet, and very little brain.”

    The third answer was, “Began in 1958.”

    There it was, The Daffodil Principle.  For me,that moment was a life-changing experience.  I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who, more than forty years before, had begun – one bulb at a time – to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountain top.

    This unknown woman had forever changed the world in which she lived.  She had created something of ineffable magnificence, beauty, and inspiration.

    The principle her daffodil garden taught: . . . to move toward our goals and desires one step at a time – often just one baby-step at a time – and to love the doing.  When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small increments of effort, we too will find we can accomplish magnificent things.  We CAN change the world.

    When Edwards expressed regret that she hadn’t devoted thirty or forty years toward some comparably wonderful achievement, her daughter summed up the message of the day by answering simply: “Start now.”

    We are on the path now.  It doesn’t begin after we get out of school, or after we get married, or after we have children, or after our children grow up, or after our home is paid off, or after we retire, or after we die.  This is it – now.  The point of our life is the journey, not the destination.  So let’s live like we mean it.