Let the Treasure Hunt Begin
By Charles Rush
September 5, 2010
Matthew 13: 44
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.7Mb) ]
the opening of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” Peter, Susan, Lucy, Edmond have just been spirited out of London during the bombing raids of World War 2. They've been sent to the country home of their Great Uncle Digory for an extended stay. Cut off from the friends and family, with only the barest essentials packed, sentenced to their stiff great Uncle and his large, cold, child hostile environment. They looked at each other with resignation unto boredom.
After a dreadful
day of gloomy drizzle and rain, Lucy is idly wandering around room after
uninhabited room, exploring this vast, haunting country estate, when she comes
upon a grand old wardrobe, in one of the bedrooms on the attic floor. She opens
it, and reaches in through the coats and fur jackets, to see what is in there.
As she steps into the coats themselves, they rather part and suddenly she has
left behind the stale smell of mothballs, she has left behind the dreary
drizzle, and stepped into a wonderful world of crisp falling snow, replete with
a faun, as in a half-man, half-goat faun. She sees a light glowing in the
distance, the faun just biding time.
She looks back
into the wardrobe, outside to the dreary English drizzle, smelling the
mothballs. She leans back through the coats to the falling snow among cedars,
the faun that beckons, the light in the distance.
She steps back
into the wardrobe and thinks of her brothers, sisters, her Mum and Dad in
London. And then she leaps through the coats and tumbles into a whole other
existence, one that has wee people, just like in the old England before it was
so banal. Go for it.
It is still the
secret longing of every kid. Our world isn't quite so uniform as Levittown but
we might be surprised to hear our children interviewed on the subject of
adventure. I doubt that our children are going to remember us as real
adventurous either. I suspect that twenty years from now, when our children
lampoon us, they will remember how concerned the whole generation was about
safety. They are going to tell us that we loved them so much, we couldn't let
them fall.
Of course, a
great deal of it is legitimate. We've learned a few things. When I was a child
in the South, one of our favorite past times in the summer was riding our bikes
in the evening behind the trucks that sprayed clouds of DDT to kill mosquitoes.
I swear I never once heard a parent suggest we shouldn't ride right behind the
truck, let alone come in doors, or organize a protest against spraying in
general.
Ours is a
generation that believes in safety. This is a generation that added an 11th
commandment. “Thou shalt not unbuckle thy seat belt for any reason at any
time.” It is amazing to see toddlers all buckled in. I had trouble getting my
children to actually stay in a car seat. But nowadays these car seats are so
deluxe. Soon they will come with a built in juice dispenser and a remote to the
VCR, and a popcorn maker. Why would you ever need to leave?
Our playgrounds
are phenomenal. All rounded edges. Lots of plastic and tire rubber instead of
the old metal. Slides that are tubes so you can't fall off. Nice fencing all
the way around it with a gate that is locked every evening. And if a kid does a
kamikaze off the three foot high walk way, he is cushioned by 18 inches of
mulch.
Or, how about
these new trampolines that have all the springs covered with pads and come with
a screen all the way around the tramp to catch anyone that might go over the
edge. They have a netted top, looks like a cage. Kids jump around. All the
parents have to do is throw in some bananas and apples, you could probably come
back in a week.
I was with one
of my godson's last weekend. He wanted to show me how he could ride his new
scooter. He had on his helmet, his elbow pads, his knee pads and a mouth piece
just to ride down a 5 degree slope on his driveway. He was having a hard time
keeping his balance. No wonder, he looked like the Michelin man.
Of course, part
of this is driven by law suits. Nowadays, if an accident happens, somebody gets
sued for it. It is as if, we are teaching the next generation that accidents no
longer actually happen. I suspect our children are going to tell us, that we
acted as if we believed that the goal of parenting is to get our kids through
their youth without a broken bone, without any pain. That is understandable for
parents but it is not very exciting either.
My fear is that
we are communicating this to our kids about religion as well. Directly and
indirectly, I'm worried that we are telling them that religion is a kind of
inoculation that will be good for them in the big, wide world of sex, drugs,
and violent movies. We got through your religious training period when we were
kids, you'll get through it too. It's like oatmeal, not very exciting, but “it's
the right thing to do.”
Now, it may be
true that we didn't get much from the institutional church when we were kids
and it may be true of most church programs we could enroll our kids in today.
But Jesus says
this is not true of the Kingdom of God. We've just had bad religion. Jesus says
that the Kingdom of God is like finding a treasure in a field. It is so joyful
and exciting that we are willing to sell everything we own to buy the field and
have that treasure.
In the ancient
world, people buried stuff all the time. This was an era of regular wars.
Burying stuff was the safest way to protect precious cargo. The Kingdom of God
is like stumbling on some buried loot from one of these wars.
The Kingdom of
God is that dizzying, giddy feeling you get when the IPO takes off like a
rocket you could not have predicted. It is that irrepressible hope that fills
your heart when you meet someone that just unlocks the key to your soul and you
are bowled over giddy that this is really happening. Your mind is bubbling with
possibility… a whole new vista has suddenly opened up… you can't even sleep it
is so overwhelming. The past is past and you have this surge of creative energy
about what is coming soon.
I suspect that
our kids are aching for a little real adventure in the midst of all this
safety. The real spiritual life is an adventure like that, let's not forget it.
And in the bible, real spiritual encounters so often come in open-ended
adventures. Abraham and Sarah are told to “go to a land that I will show you”
by God. Moses is called out of the desert to go to Egypt and speak for God”.
Lived
spirituality is an adventure. And it is not only an outward adventure, it is
also an inward adventure. I am thinking for a moment of a spiritual journey not
in the bible but which we can learn from nevertheless, the journey of Odysseus
one of the oldest spiritual journeys recorded.
Odysseus fights
a noble battle against the Trojans and he wants nothing more than to return
home to his beloved wife Penelope and find happiness. But happiness is not so
easy and you can't just sail back home to realize our full spiritual purpose.
On the way home,
Odysseus is held captive on an island by Calypso, a goddess that forces him to
love her until he is sexually drained every night. Rough work, but someone has
to do it. He is stranded on this island and she will not let him go. She
symbolizes the inner struggle that we all have to go through coming to grips
with the primordial sexual urges that rise up within us and control us at different
points in our lives, particularly in our youth.
Part of the
interior spiritual journey is coming to grips with our emotional impulses and
corralling them in a productive spiritual direction, lest they drive us. We
corral them for a fuller, richer purpose.
At one point,
Odysseus proclaims that his love for his wife is so great that all other
sexuality causes him pain. He pleads to be freed and the mythical Calypso, upon
hearing this, lets him go.
He sails for
home again. But he is stranded again on an island and has to fight the Cyclops,
a half-god/ half-man that is a brute no one can handle. Again, the outer
adventure is matched with an inner adventure. As we go through life, we have to
face the primordial brute forces of emotion that reside so deeply in our selves
that they threaten to overwhelm us on occasion- anger, frustration, the lust
for revenge, rage. It doesn't matter that they are real or apparent, they are
parts of ourselves that still have to be met and wrestled with if we are ever
to find our way home to happiness.
Jenny in Forrest
Gump goes back home with Forrest one day to the house she grew up in.
Standing there, she remembers the sexual abuse that she suffered as a child at
the hands of her father. The house is empty now. Her father is dead. She picks
up a rock and throws it through the window… and another, and another. She is
wailing and throwing. Forrest says “sometimes there just aren't enough rocks.”
Real rage, real revenge is a lot to deal with spiritually.
Like so many
real victims of abuse or unjust suffering, her adult life revolves around
managing the subterranean emotions of anger, revenge, rage. And the polar twin,
self-loathing, feelings of unworthiness, licentious behavior that doesn't take
yourself seriously.
No, that is
tough spiritual work, wrestling with those subterranean emotions, tough mainly
because we don't even realize that they are affecting us until we have already
acted out in some rash, stupid, self-defeating manner. It is a life long
adventure to tame them.
Odysseus defeats
the Calypso, a giant that has killed hundreds and hundreds of men who have
tried to battle it and lost their lives. He continues home.
He lands on
another island and is taken to cave to the underworld. He sees his old comrades
that died in battle at Troy. He sees his mother. He sees his childhood friends
and mentors. He has to come face to face with the inevitability of his own
dying, his own mortality. You can't find the full spiritual meaning of our
happiness on this earth without coming face to face with your own dying. That
is not easy work either but it simply must be done. Through that encounter, he
comes to realize that beauty, power, wealth, position are all fleeting. They
come and go but they don't last. He comes to realize that the only thing that
transcends time is our character- the excellence that we have internalized and
externalized in gestures of love, compassion and sacrifice for others. For the
rest of his life, he decides, he is going to focus on character.
Finally, he gets
home. He has been away for 10 years. He comes disguised as an old Man. Things
have changed. His kingdom is in disarray. A bunch of people figure that he is
dead. His old friends having big feasts on his cows while he was away. Some of
them have been trying to seduce his wife full time. Now, he has the biggest and
most painful challenge of all. He has to figure out who is genuine and who is a
well-meaning fraud. He has to look into the soul of other and discern who has
character, who is virtuous. That takes wisdom. And wisdom only
comes after you have mastered all these other things.
At this point in
his life, he has seen all that glory on the battle field has to offer. He
understands the possibility and limits of money and material things. He has
mastered his emotions and his sexuality. His morality and his spirituality are
his own. No one has to tell him what to do. They don't have to guilt him into
anything. That is not the point. He is beyond that. His moral spirituality is
internalized. He is in search of excellence, of a virtue that money cannot buy
and time cannot rust.
The truth is
that authentic spirituality is something we make our own. It is like a treasure
that we find. The truth is that the inner journey is as adventurous as the
outer journey. It is as challenging to master and a great reward when you
discover true excellence and virtue. I'm not saying it is easy. I'm not saying
it's quick. But it is not boring and frankly, it is not safe either. No matter
how much we inoculate ourselves against it, the spiritual adventure will try us
to the very depth of our souls. But what an adventure it is. My friends, let
the treasure hunt begin. Amen.
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