Sermon: The Haj and the Profundity of Repentance

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The Hajj and the Profundity of Repentance

By Charles Rush

March 19, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 3.5Mb) ]

was stirring sweetener into my latte at Starbucks this week and two neighbors were talking to each other about this and that. The subject turned to his impending birthday party, his 50th birthday party. She says to him, 'so who is your minder?' He says, 'Minder?' She is walking away and says, 'Someone ought to be assigned to follow you around for a year.' He turns back to me, a total stranger, and asks 'Do I look like I need someone to follow me around?' I though about it for a second and nodded, "Yes… yes you do."

That exchange took me back to the springtime at college, leafing through the library at Wake Forest, doing a paper on Aristotle. He was actually talking about the disposition for thinking philosophically and how young people are not given over to that sort of reflection because it is not their time of life. And he went through the Greek life cycle for Men- women didn't really count in his mind, I apologize- there is a season for athletics, a season for soldiering, a season for the market place which is the season for the accumulation of wealth, a season for parenting, a season for civic involvement, a season for running the committees and charities and helping to sponsor the big festivals that make up the life of the polis.

But then there is another season. 50 was old for Aristotle. He was thinking that you might live another 10 years, maybe. At this point in your life, you have traveled, you know human natures best and worst capacities, you know the possibilities and limits of communal life, you have lived deprivation and eaten some of the best food the world has to offer. The mind is more settled, you are not completely driven by your sensual impulses as you are when you are younger.

At this point, you need to take a break and reassess. You need to get off every committee and all involvements. You need to be free of your family. He thought you should go away for a while and reflect on your life, on your mortality, on your purpose for living, and what you should do for the remainder of your life.

Aristotle said that this last phase of life should be given over to thinking about matters eternal, to philosophy. You should be able to have the freedom and the creativity to reflect on the bigger picture and to put the purpose of your living into some perspective.

But, he was pretty sure that you could only do that if you were free. So this last phase of life is all about shedding yourself. Aristotle said that the ideal death is one where you go out the way that you came in, with just your tunic. You don't need all this stuff. Turn it over to others and take this time to go inward.

It struck me at the time because, I was only 19 and really totally unable to envision how life would be at 50 from any internal, existential perspective. But he said, even your family should be up for review. When you take this time apart, your wife should do it too. And he said, spouses should free each other in advance… And only after you have gone away and come back, should you talk together and decide whether you want to remain partners for the last phase of life or whether you need to embark on a whole different direction and leave your extended family behind perhaps.

If memory serves, he skipped over how to divide up these assets and what to do if one wants to be free and the other doesn't. And that is just as well because it is beside the point spiritually. I was taken by the radical openness of his vision and the spiritual liveliness of it. Far from just a retirement to play golf or fish and take a nap in the afternoon, there was this sense that only now do you actually have the life experience and only now have you accomplished enough to be able to embark on the fullest spiritual quest that our life has to offer, Contemplation and the discourse on the big picture with other wise people.

A couple years later, I read a quite similar thing in Divinity School when I picked up the Confessions by St. Augustine. Augustine, as some of you will know, was one of the most formidable intellects of his age, who became a theologian of enormous historical influence in Western tradition.

In the Confessions he recounts his life from a spiritual point of view. Historians (like Peter Brown at Princeton) have helped us fill in the gaps. Augustine was a very passionate young man. Despite his considerable talents and his aristocratic family connections and his education, Augustine was fairly consumed with a girlfriend that he could not marry because they were in different social classes and his Mother didn't approve. Here, a seasoned therapist could endlessly track down threads of Augustine's interior psychological life but I won't. By his own admission he obsessed with women and with parties in his twenties. That is what he actually lived for. In his thirties and early forties, it was women, career or reputation, and parties, each capturing his attention in rotating fashion. They occupied all of his conscious concentration and his unconscious motivation.

Right around 50, he became reflective about his life and realized that he was insubstantial as a spiritual person. He was quite accomplished, he had indulged himself quite a lot, but the older he got the more restless and anxious he had become. He was subconsciously worried because he hadn't actually figured anything out and he wasn't very centered in himself because he had spent most of his life looking for his lover to fulfill him or getting intoxicated or competing in his career. He spiritual character was weak and ineffectual and subconsciously this bothered him like putting off a visit to the doctor because you know that the report is going to have bad news that forces changes you wish you didn't have to make.

Augustine's conversion was rather dramatic and passionate like the rest of his life. He basically left behind his wife, his girlfriend, his career, the parties, and he withdrew to a Monastery in North Africa where he began to reflect on the meaning of life, of what God wants us to accomplish during our short time here. He adopted an austere lifestyle in the arid sands near the ruin of the ancient civilization of Carthage. He changed spiritual focus with very little external stimulation to divert his attention so that he could focus inwardly and become contemplative. Now his intellect and his creativity and his passion became focused in a concentrated synchronous way and an amazing amount of writing poured forth from his pen that cast a long shadow down the course of Western history. That spiritual concentration released a prodigious output so that the last part of his life became, by far, his most prodigious and most profound.

Just in case you are concerned, I'm not about to go to a monastery in North Africa or any other place, though I've stood where St. Augustine stood out of a certain respect for he was a worthy guide…

But, I am taken by this one dimension of our spiritual tradition, that of repentance or conversion. I don't mean repentance in the sense of renouncing our pedestrian sins in the confessional- cheating, stealing, sabotage, betrayal, lying. That is too limiting spiritually. I'm talking about profound life changes that happen to you a couple three times in your life possibly where you are put on a different track.

Fundamentally, Christianity is a spirituality of conversion or repentance. It is one principal characteristic that we share with Islam, probably because both Jesus and Mohammed had experiences as mature adults where they felt themselves to be turned around and set in whole new directions.

Both of them broke with the religious heritage that they inherited enough that their disciples interpreted their lives as ones that renounced an old way of being in order to embrace a new and different spiritual orientation. They described their lives as 'turned around.'

Both Jesus and Mohammed had pivotal spiritual experiences in the desert, the physical austerity facilitating spiritual reflection and change. And their earliest disciples found themselves establishing places in the desert to retreat in order to seek a similar experience of change. Both of them pick up on the theme of seeing our lives as a spiritual adventure that is given to us in the Hebrew Bible in the characters of Abraham, Sarah, Moses and Miriam. These characters are called in the middle of their lives to do something new, to start a new adventure, to pack up and leave behind what they had known up to that point and start out in the direction of the unknown and follow the Spirit of God as it leads in a fresh new chapter of some important, indeed life defining challenge. And they have to discern what this new thing is, not easy. And they have to travel to new place, leaving behind most of what they have known. It is not comfortable but you get the feeling that on their deathbeds they all said this is was the most fulfilling thing they ever did. It was the most alive they felt.

In the old days, we used to have a built in way of actualizing this in the Christian tradition through pilgrimages, some to holy places in Europe, some back to Jerusalem itself. Today, very few Christians have continued that practice that was so widely done through the Middle Ages.

Today, it is most profoundly carried on in Islam through the Hajj, the pilgrimage that Muslims are enjoined to make if they can, to Mecca, once in their life. The Hajj is a major ordeal that takes quite a lot of planning to accomplish and a good chunk of time as well.

It takes Muslims back to the desert near where Mohammed first heard the call of God in order to trace a several day pilgrimage that remembers Abraham taking his son into the desert, the son through whom God had blessed Abraham and promised the future blessing of his people. What is remembered out of that epic drama is the way that Abraham reached a point in his life with God where there was nothing that he would hold back in order to follow God, even his most precious child. It was that expression of transcendent loyalty, unqualified and complete, that is remembered as something of a breakthrough for authentic faith.

In that story Abraham nearly sacrifices his son, his most precious son, and that dimension of the story is filled with an abandon fraught with moral risk, indeed contradiction. It threatens to violate a fundamental taboo, not only taking life, taking it in the name of God, taking our own children in the name of God.

But the story means to take us to that place of faith in the midst of uncertainty, but not only that, faith in the midst of contradiction and moral ambiguity, it is a confusion that threatens to overwhelm us. And it is only resolved by God, but not before Abraham has his arm raised with the knife at the height of abandon and obedience, this movement of uncertainty and resolve. Through all of that God honors this loyalty in Abraham that supercedes and all earthly ties that he has forged through this long life and sets him in a new direction for the remainder of this days.

The text is meant to be fearful and horrifying, but strangely faithful and honorable at the same time. It is this way, because it is a reminder that we get to junctures in our life, not one, not two but a few junctures, where we are positioned to shed the ties that bound us through family, through community, through vocation, to reassess and re-direct ourselves for the future. It is what needs to happen, or sometimes, it just has to happen. Death, tragedy just force it upon us. I was reading a story about two brothers that were separated one fateful day when the SS invaded their town and each fled for their lives in different directions. They had one of those moments, completely unexpected where they simply had to drop it all and run and keep running, each their own way, both wondering about the other, presuming with each passing year that they were dead. Now, 50 years later, they are re-united for the first time. Some times these changes are forced upon us.

Other times, like Aristotle imagined it ought to be, we have the freedom, the creativity, and the contemplative space to envision these changes ourselves.

One of the profundities of the Hajj is doing it with over a million other people. It is literally the case that people come to this place from all over the world. That experience alone fills you with a universal transcendent awe in the midst of the sheer scope and breadth of people all bound by this common tradition and worship.

And in the Hajj, everyone comes as a pilgrim. They are asked to adopt the simple white tunic of the pilgrim in the Middle East, encouraging everyone to be the same to recognize their common human quest. It is, in fact, about the same amount of cloth that you would wrap a corpse in at death, because one of the things that it is important for the pilgrims on the Hajj to reflect on, subconsciously, is their own mortality. It is done in mid-life, remembering that the clock is running, and you are asking yourself, 'what is it that God wants me to do with my remaining time?'

It helps to be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people dressed exactly the same, following the same route traveled by pilgrims for centuries before you and centuries after you, eating the same prescribed foods, saying prayers at the same time. It helps to give you a certain spiritual perspective, to see that from God's point of view, there is not nearly so much unique to you as there is common with those around you, that whatever distinctions of power, wealth, and status you may use to separate and define yourself at home, it just dissipates when you step into the wide river of historical humanity. It helps you to be delivered of your own sense of vanity and importance so that you might have an authentic conversation with the Almighty during the course of that week, walking across the sand with hundreds of thousands of other people.

What is genuinely moving to hear from the pilgrims is their reflections at the end of the Hajj after 10 days. For many of them, somewhere along the way, they became changed. They realize that the woman that got off the plane when it landed at Mecca and the woman that will get back on the plane to return to her home far away are not the same women anymore. They say things like 'That was my life up to here, but from now on, I am doing this.' Maybe they go back home, maybe they rejoin their family again and even resume their old jobs, but it is not the same because they are not the same.

They may not be able to exactly describe it but they are free. They are spiritually free. The old things that bound them have been reassessed, many of them let go. They are getting God directed and focused on what is really important. They are not being driven by their desires as much as they have a sense of self-direction that comes from being properly centered transcendently in God.

St. Augustine said at the end of the book about his life, "My heart was restless until it was at rest in Thee". That is the possibility of profound conversion. But it is not a one time thing. We don't just find rest and then, aha, it is over.

No, but we do change. We can become less restless. God can re-direct us… perhaps, more profoundly as we get past a certain age. Maybe the best is yet to come, but not the best, the most profound. I hope they are right. And may you be courageous enough to 'let go… And let God.' Amen.