Service for October 4, 2015

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Kamloops

Rosemary Morrison

“Wander, there is no road, the road is made by walking.”

Antonio Machado

Opening Words – Rosemary -

Up on the Hill’s Back - by David Whyte

Up on the hill’s back

field lines have stopped

memories still pass the next horizon

nothing halts the age of the body walking

not the young growth of trees

nor the fallen trunk across the hill path.

When I have passed this way

the crows

will still bear down fiercely from the west

the lights wink on

and night come bringing rain

sweeping the branches down

life passes

and clouds mound darkness in the west

where the path turns

grass breaks in furrows down the hill

whoever asks of darkness

must touch the darkness in themself

whoever asks of grass

bend down in the moving stalks

and under the blades

feel the small birds shivering

waiting to rise in the morning light.

Homily: “Wander, there is no road, the road is made by walking.” (Antonio Machado)

This past summer I visited with my daughter Elizabeth at her home in Duncan. There were some precious moments, paddling around in the cold river that runs near her home, sipping tea on her back deck and then more swimming at Fuller Lake on the way to the ferry and back home. While I was there I asked her it she had a book I could read, I had forgotten to bring one. Probably on purpose because all my books right now are pretty academic and theological. Not the kind of light summer reading I was longing to do. She gave me this one – (Hold up book) She told me I could keep it as it was on the “going back to the second hand book store pile.” I picked it up and started reading and was immediately hooked. Rachel Joyce, an English authour, had written many plays, but this lovely novel is her first. The front flap states: “When Harold Fry leaves his house one morning to post a letter, with his wife vacuuming upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other. He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof jacket or mobile phone. All he knows is that he must keep walking. To save someone else’s life. A novel of unsentimental charm, humour and profound insight into the thoughts and feelings we all bury deep within our hearts.

This morning I would like to share with you the unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry along with some of those profound insights into the thoughts and feelings we all bury deep within our hearts. You know, while I was reading the book, I kept thinking, ‘there is a sermon in here!’But then, everything I read and hear, I think that. My hope for this morning though, is that you come away believing more strongly in yourself and your great capacity to love.

How many here have read this book? I’m not going to relay the whole story to you, just enough for you to get the messages that come from it. So here goes, Harold Fry gets a letter in the mail from a woman by the name of Queenie Hennessy, a woman he had worked with at his job at the brewery. She wrote him to let him know she was dying of cancer. He writes an awkward reply, not sure of what to say and heads to the post. Meanwhile, Maureen is upstairs cleaning and making sure their son’s room is ready for when he comes home to visit. She misses him! Harold, on his way out the door longs to go to her, to touch her, connect with her, but does not know how. This is our first clue that something has come between them, that things are not the way they used to be. As he gets to the post office he realizes he is not ready to release his correspondence to Queenie. There is a bond between them that the reader only gets to speculate about. By this time I had already decided they had had an affair and that was why Harold and Maureen were no longer close. However, the pivotal moment in the story comes when Harold decides he is hungry and steps into a gas station to get a snack. He strikes up a conversation with the young woman there. She says this to him:

(Reading from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry)

“My aunt had cancer,” she said. “I mean, it’s everywhere.” She cast her eyes up and down the shop shelves, suggesting it was even to be found tucked behind the road maps and Turtle Wax polish. “You have to keep positive, though.”

Harold stopped eating his burger and mopped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Positive?’

“You have to believe. That’s what I think. It’s not about medicine and all that stuff. You have to believe a person can get better. There is so much in the human mind we don’t understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.”

Harold gazed at the girl in awe. He didn’t know how it had happened, but she seemed to be standing in a pool of light, as if the sun had moved, and her hair and skin shone with luminous clarity. Maybe he was staring too hard, because she gave a shrug and chewed at her lower lip. “Am I talking crap?”

“Gosh, no. Not at all. It’s very interesting. I’m afraid religion is not something I ever quite got the hang of.”

“I don’t mean, like, religious. I mean, trusting what you don’t know and going for it. Believing you can make a difference. “

Harold felt he had never come across such simple certainty, and in such a young person; she made it sound obvious. “And she got better, did she? Your aunt? Because you believed she could?”

“She said it gave her hope when everything else was gone---“….

Harold pictured Queenie dozing at one end of England and himself in a phone booth at the other, with things in between that he didn’t know and could only imagine: roads, fields, rivers, woods, moors, peaks and valley, and so many people. He would meet and pass them all. There was no deliberation, no reasoning. The decision came in the same moment as the idea. He was laughing at the simplicity of it.

“Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. Because I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living.” …

Overhead a seagull cracked its wings and laughed. (end of the reading)

As long as I walk, she must live. This was the mantra that took him from his home in south England to the most northern point in England. I very long distance for someone to walk, especially someone like Harold, who, as his wife points out, “The only walking you have done, Harold, is to the car and back.”

What a ludicrous and preposterous idea. Walking to save a life. As if the mere act of doing so will stop the cancer cells hundreds of kilometers away from advancing. But there were miracles on this sojourn. Many of them.

I don’t want to focus so much on the plot of the story, but on three important things that come from the story that spoke to me.

  • As he walked, he began to think through and unravel the pain in his life.
  • He decided he could trust others and the world to meet his needs.
  • It’s never too late for forgiveness and second chances.

Each step that Harold walked loosened the ties that bound him up so tightly. An abusive father, a mother who abandoned him, the disappointment that his wife had for him placed these ties there. Not to mention the deep disappointment he felt in himself. Now all of a sudden, he is doing a meaningful thing, and word gets around. The media grabs hold of this feel-good story and for the first time in a long time he has to say something that means something. People begin to recognize him on the street so he can’t bow his head and pretend he is invisible anymore. As he walks, Harold can’t stop the thoughts as he begins to make sense of and question the stories that bound him up as effectively as a publisher binds stories into a book. He looks deeply at the messages he was given as a child and decides it wasn’t his fault his mother left, or that his father drank too much, or that he was kicked out of his home on his 16th birthday. Those things didn’t need to identify him any longer. Byron Katie, a modern day self made guru has a saying, “don’t believe your thoughts.” She also says, “A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.” I think we can all get caught up in the stories of our lives and get mired in the muckiness and complexity of them keeping us stuck. Harold Fry was suffering, he was alienated from his son and his wife, he didn’t have any friends, and he filled his days with mundane tasks and watching television. As Harold began to question his stories and the meanings he had attached to them he began to see how he could change those thoughts. He wasn’t worthless, he was doing an important thing. Granted a lot of these new found positive feelings was coming from the outsidehimself, but that didn’t matter. Once a rock starts it’s downhill descent, it keeps on going.

I had once thought about walking the Camino in France and Spain. As I investigated I read accounts of other’s experiences. People talked about how the walking cleared their heads, let them get to the bottom of their being, exorcised their demons so to speak. I think this is what happened to Harold. Many poets and philosophers suggest it is in walking or sitting or just keeping still that the noise subsides and we can begin to figure out what is important. In the story, Harold couldn’t stop the replaying of the painful moments of his life that had caused him so much suffering. So much so that they began to spill out, he began to name the unnamed between he and Maureen on his frequent phone calls home. He started those ‘fierce conversations.’ Susan Scott, authour of “Fierce Conversations” states, “ Our work, our relationships, and our lives succeed or fail one conversation at a time. While no single conversation is guaranteed to transform a company, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can. Speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have with this person. It could be. Participate as if it matters. It does.” What I take from Susan Scott’s work and the fictitious story of Harold is that we must live authentically. It is so important to speak our truth to ourselves and to our friends and family. The words we don’t say are the bricks used to build walls between us. Let’s just take a couple breaths here to think about the stories of our own lives. Do we really need to believe them? Do they need to identify us? If they are harmful can you let them go? How would you do that? (pause)

My friend Selinde and her husband Jim took a trip to Ireland this summer. It was a walking trip and they spent about a month just walking every day. She and I had lunch a couple weeks ago and she told me how they decided they would use this trip as a way to build up the trust they had in themselves, each other, in the divine, and the larger community. She said it was such a freeing exercise to not book and plan ahead, and just be open to whatever was around the next bend in the road. Her story reminded me of Harold. He decided he was carrying too much, spending too much, and planning too much. So, he sent home the few items he was carrying, including his debit and credit cards. So now he was reliant on the good will of strangers. Sometimes that worked out for him and sometimes it didn’t, but that’s not the point I don’t think. As he looked for opportunities to sleep and eat, he became more aware of those around him, he had to become involved with other people. His heart began to open and he had to trust. Brene Brown, in her book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the way we Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, talks about vulnerability. If you’ve heard any of her Ted Talks or read her work, you can attest to her work being inspiring and life giving. She states, “Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” Harold began to allow his authentic, imperfect self be seen by the world, and more importantly, to his wife, Maureen. He decided he could trust himself and her to talk about the things that hurt. She, in turn, got the courage to open up and question the thoughts and stories she had been entertaining all these years. The trust, the vulnerability and the courage to be authentic began to remove the bricks that kept them from each other for so many years. They began to see each other in a new light and started a journey of forgiveness and new beginnings. So I ask you, what are the walls made of words unspoken or spoken in your life? Are they wall of anger, or shame, or silence, perhaps misunderstanding? I know I have work to do in this area. I expect we all do.

That brings me to the last and most important point I wish to make this morning. That is; it’s never too late for forgiveness and second chances. The walk that Harold embarked on opened not only his heart, but his wife’s heart as well. There had been many hurts and disappointments and she had shut herself off from the world as effectively as Harold had. She had been blaming him for their son’s near drowning, for the boredom and loneliness she felt, and to the eventual suicide of their son. The beauty of this story, and the story of each of our lives is that we never know what the next moment is going to bring. Harold’s pilgrimage was intended to save Queenie’s life, but the life he saved was his own. Folks, it’s never too late to say sorry, to say the words that need to be said, to question the false narratives that swirl endlessly in our brains, and to love again. Our hearts have infinite capacity to expand and envelope those that need our love.

Oh, the story line. Queenie does hang on until Harold gets there, but dies soon afterward. Also, Harold and Queenie never had an affair, but she demonstrated true friendship toward Harold. Maureen decides she needs to stop pretending her son isn’t dead and instead begin grieving his death. As well, Maureen works on restoring her relationship with her husband, whom she discovers she is still in love with. Together they welcome the world they had effectively shut out back into their lives and discovered their great capacity to love.

We all have great capacity to love, to trust, and to make others feel welcome. We all need to feel like we belong, that we are wanted. I encourage all of us to take the opportunities that present themselves to live out our lives with true intentions and open authentic hearts.

So may it be, Amen.