It is said that the Antarctic fur seals, after giving birth, leave their pups while they forage for food. These
mothers can be gone for days at a time. Scientists have mused about how it is that the seals and their
pups find one another with remarkable ease and accuracy upon the mothers return. They have discovered
that a common meeting place seems to be arranged but greater than that is the use of their voice and
sense of smell to find one another. From birth, if not before: the scent of the mother is imprinted in the
pup’s memory. This fact led one theologian to muse: “that’s how it is with God. We are imprinted with a
memory of God, and God is imprinted with a memory of us, and even if it takes a lifetime, we will find
each other.”[1] If only keeping connected to our source, to the great universal love that is God, were as
simple as using our sense of smell!
The spiritual journey, no matter what the religion or belief system is at its core about reconnecting to the
memory of God: touching or breaking open to the source from which we and all creation have been
born. Within an evolutionary framework when we consider that every cell likely comes from the same
source: that everything that is, is comprised of stardust, all of the cosmos, every creature and atom is
brought forth from the same source that burst into life all those billions of years ago: it really brings home
the idea that indeed our goal and calling is to move ever closer to the unity that is and always has been.
Unlike the seal pups, who reunite with their mamas with such ease, our journeys seem to meander
through the deepest valleys and up the highest mountains and along the most outrageous roads to
nowhere.
We know the experience of disconnection of feeling so far from God that we can’t even imagine how we
might connect again. In an essay describing her mother’s last days Simone de Beauvoir noted that the
world had shrunk to the size of her mother’s hospital room. Anyone who’s been there can relate: your
world shrinks and it takes all effort to be present to the task at hand. All of your energy is telescoped into
the struggle of your present reality. In those times of our lives it is difficult to hold onto a picture and
dream of anything larger than our current reality, our personal challenge. Process Theologian Bruce
Epperly suggests that it is “in those moments when we lose our dreams [that] we mistake realism for
reality.”[2] In other words: the struggle and circumstances we find ourselves in are real but Reality
transcends any one moment of our lives. “Our goal is merely to survive, when our destiny is to thrive. It
takes all the energy we have to look beyond our misfortunes and failures, but this larger vision-the power
of the holy imagination, the lure of an alternative realty-has always been the inspiration for the prophet
and spiritual guide.”[3]
“This larger vision, the lure of an alternative reality has always been the inspiration for the prophet:” so
true this day as we mark the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, a prophet of our time. The compelling
strength of his vision lied in his ability to draw others toward a Reality larger than their current
circumstance. What were the conditions that gave rise to his compelling strength to name a dream and
proclaim it to a nation and the world? Did his personal experience of racial segregation and oppression
break his heart open in a way that allowed the seeds of his dream to take root and burst forth? Is it
possible that our “life as small as a hospital room” experiences prepare the ground for the planting of our
dreams?
Even as we turn to the scriptures we are reminded that this scene of Jesus so effortlessly inviting the first
disciples to follow him has a back story, filled with challenge and struggle and hard earned clarity. Before
these fisher folk dropped their nets and followed, without so much as a look back, we learn about Jesus
spending 40 days and nights in the wilderness. It was his personal time of deep spiritual questing,
clarifying, tempting and ultimately dreaming. He is no sooner out of his dark night of the soul than he
learns of John’s arrest. His cousin, the one who baptized him, the one person who seemed to support his
vision and calling perhaps before Jesus himself: arrested and later martyred. Jesus had the ability to not
confuse realism with reality: as he called those first followers he was deeply connected to his source to
God.
There is something to ponder here about the place Jesus has come from that leads him to then move out
and invite others to follow. Did his vision of this kingdom of God, his calling to enact it, find its birth in
his places of struggle and heartbreak and disappointment and fear? As Jesus walks along beside the lake
and calls out to these fishers to follow we are to assume that somehow they hear the depth of the call, the
authenticity of Jesus dream radiates and these two, in that moment, are open to receiving the dream or at
the very least compelled to run toward it. It is the work of prophets and saviours to cast the dream for the
rest of us even and especially when we have lost sight of the dream ourselves.
Science, religion, and literature all point toward this truth. The power of those who compel others to
drop our nets and run is their sheer ability to be in tune with this. These are the ones who have not
forgotten the scent of their mama. The call of the disciples is the call to dream, the dream is born out of
the struggle, the wrestling with demons, the falling down, the commitment and willingness to surrender
to being broken open. And we are called to dream: continually urged to open and embrace and know that
life is bigger than your hurt feelings or lost dreams, even bigger than your broken heart or sense of
inertia. Sometimes we forget our dreams and our lives become as small as the room of whatever challenge
we are currently living. We can forget too our collective dreams, the dreams of our community, our
country, the dreams of our global village.
What dreams are calling out to you? What dream is so deep within your being that you have never
actually lost its scent? What dreamers might be casting out the dream for us in this moment? Like the
ones who were fishing by the sea of Galilee that day might we be open to something new: some new place,
new vision, some new way of being, living, hoping?
What dream might be calling you and us to drop everything and follow? The paradox is just as T.S. Eliot
describes it: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where
we started and know the place for the first time.”[4] Whether it’s Jesus or Mohammed or Martin Luther
King: the dreamers never actually invite us somewhere new but always back home, always back to our
destiny…. Those first disciples of Jesus are dropping their nets and leaving home: because they see a
glimmer that promises to lead them home.
*****
In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr spent about a month in a Birmingham jail. While there he wrote the
infamous “Letters from a Birmingham Jail,” in response to a statement by eight clergymen from Alabama
criticising the Birmingham campaign. It was a lengthy bit of prose: in it he wrote:
I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not
be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial
"outside agitator" idea…. And then he writes: Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is
much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had
been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell,
other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?[5]
With his room as small as a jail cell Martin Luther King nurtured a dream that would allure others to drop
their nets and their bigotries and return to the scent of love that is our destiny. Prophets pick up on this
truth and run with it: offer us the promise of thriving, the vision of a dream, the promise that there is
more to it than I can currently see. The prophets of every age and every tradition cast the dream,
especially when our lives keep us from doing that for ourselves. These dreamers are not from some other
worldly place, do not receive the vision of the dream from anywhere other than a place of deep listening
and an openness to receiving the dream: from their experience of the tempting wilderness or the stale
cramped jail cell that touches their lives to the core.
In the words of Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh: “The miracle is not to walk on water. The
miracle is to walk on the earth.[6] As we make our way on this sacred earth, the question echoes through
time: What is your dream? What nets must you drop that you might follow the Way home? You are
imprinted with the memory of God and God is imprinted with the memory of you: the dream is as close
as your very heart and as far as the edges of an endless universe. And it is this dream, this love, that will
set us free. Amen
[1] Rodger Y Nishioka, “Pastoral Perspective”, in David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Feasting
on the Word, Year A, Volume 1 (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 288.
[2] Bruce G Epperly, “In the Spirit of Martin Luther King Jr: Cultivating a Holy
Imagination”, www.patheos.com, January 14, 2011.
[3] ibid
[4] T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding.
[5] Martin Luther King Jr, Letters from a Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963.
[6] As quoted in Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, (HarperOne, 2009), 53.