Returning, Again

"[Returning] is not a comfortable excuse for hiding out in old certitudes, but rather a constant pushing forward to test one’s belief and use it. . . ."

-Dan Wakefield

"To repent does not mean to feel really bad about sins; rather, it means to embark on a path of return."

-Marcus Borg

All of us were searching for a way to read the Bible that wouldn’t insult our intelligence, and that would help us to understand the Bible’s place, for better and worse, not only in our own faith, but also in that of the wider culture. My hope was that I might help to liberate the Bible from some of the more negative associations that have attached to it in recent years, when some of us have felt like we are being bludgeoned by this mysterious book that so many people claim to be so knowledgeable about.

The class was thus an opportunity to return to the Bible, and, as the title of Borg’s book suggests, to "read it again for the first time": that is, to read the Bible with fresh eyes and ears. It was an opportunity to see if the Bible can still have relevance for those of us who choose not to read it literally, but to strip away the various layers of interpretation that have been laid on top of it, and to approach it in all its literary and historical complexity.

I like to think that for some of us the class marked a new beginning of sorts, a new willingness to understand with an open mind and heart something we had almost decided was irrelevant to us. And in the process, I like to think that we discovered the truth of Dan Wakefield’s claim in his book Returning that, "[Returning] is not a comfortable excuse for hiding out in old certitudes, but rather a constant pushing forward. . . ." Returning, paradoxically, means to make a new start. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets,

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.

As religious liberals, we have an obligation to use our God-given reason to try to make sense of the world. We have an obligation not to take things for granted and not to believe everything we are told. We have embarked upon what our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles used to call "a free and disciplined search for truth." Even our knowledge of God, as Emerson reminded us, must be "at first hand." We mustn’t take anyone else’s word for it. This is much more difficult than it sounds. Sometimes it is easier to acquiesce to another’s thinking than to embark on the path of return. Intellectual laziness is a great temptation. We would prefer not to cover ground that we have already crossed. But sometimes we must if we hope "to know the place for the first time."

Perhaps it is the return of Spring after a very long, cold, and snowy winter, that leads me down this particular path of thought. The news out of Iraq, the knowledge of the terrible tragedy taking place in the Sudan, yet another school massacre, the shooting of a talented young man on the mean streets of Lawrence, the senseless death of a local young woman in a car accident and her immigrant parents’ grief, idiocy in the halls of government that only seems to get worse with each passing day, natural disasters--all have leant an edge of depression and despair and doom to most of my winter meditations.

James Carroll, with whom I do not always agree (though I do so more often than not), but who always makes me think, wrote about such feelings in his Boston Globe column this week entitled "Spring’s Mystery":

Every individual’s story, unlike the springtime narrative of eternal return, proposes the recognition that death is more powerful than life. It feels right, therefore, to treat death as the enemy. Every person leaves the world as the victim, so it seems, of a betrayal. How can death’s inevitability not be terrifying? How, when it strikes first at your beloved ones, can you not be left bereft? But there is something in your very awareness of all this that changes the meaning of such experience. You are the creature that looks out the window and, seeing a drop of water on a nascent bud, insists on seeing something more. . . . You know what pain feels like, and are also capable of grief, but the pinch of such experience awakens a broader consciousness that is not defined by the narrow limits of time. . . .

You and yours have been mightily obsessed with the end of life lately. The news is full of death’s great battle, which has a way of making all humans foolish and sad. But close attention to the improb- able truth of attention itself, sparked by a little water on the black branch outside the window, can lead to an absolute affirmation of life. Life to the full.

We have made an idol of a particular notion of "freedom," forgetting again that freedom from hunger and disease is what the vast majority of humans long for. Once more, we fail to see the ways in which American-style freedom includes dehumanized elements (violence, prurience, greed) that others might properly resist.

In Iraq, we reenact the perverse American script that saves by destroying. In Korea, once again (Secretary Condoleeza Rice resplend- ent in a military bunker), we imagine that saber rattling helps. As for the international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank, we express our contempt by appointing as representatives their sworn enemies.

Instead, as we pay untold billions for an ill-considered and morally questionable war, and as we enjoy one of the highest standards of living ever known in the history of the world, we talk of stripping away the last vestiges of our social safety net, our education and medical insurance systems are in crisis, and our children are victimized by random and not so random acts of violence. Something, as Hamlet famously said, is definitely rotten in the state of Denmark.

Dan Wakefield writes that "‘Returning’ to me does not just mean ‘going back’ to something, but rather, re-turning as in ‘turning again,’ for the process is continuous and lifelong, a constant renewal and discovery." I guess that after this long winter, that is what I am most in need of: renewal and discovery. Renewal of my hope for humankind, which has taken some hits of late, and discovery of new ways to make peace and the Kingdom of God here on earth a reality.

One of the things that our class on the Bible discovered in returning to it is how very radical it is. The Hebrew prophets weren’t kidding around when they called for "justice [to] roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream." Jesus wasn’t kidding around when he said things like "blessed are you poor" and "woe to you who are rich" and the almost unthinkable "love your enemies." The Bible is one long record of human beings speaking truth to power. The Bible, as we learned again in our class, is a prolonged and consistent response to systems of domination past, present, and future. It is the report card of an underdog people. Unfortunately, it has been pretty well co-opted by the powers that be, and at no time, I believe, has this been truer than in the present moment.

I welcome the return of spring! Inevitably it lifts my spirits, and gives me new hope for the work that still lies ahead. Perhaps it contains the sign of my own returning: to the things that I care passionately about, to my own best nature, to a vision of the world made new. Would that it would signal such a return by our country and our planet.

In the poem which I read to you this morning, Wendell Berry wrote of the "the darker circles of return." We know what he meant. But death is not the only reality we know. In another poem, entitled "Returning," he wrote,

I was walking in a dark valley
and above me the tops of the hills
had caught the morning light.
I heard the light singing as it went
among the grassblades and the leaves.
I waded upward through the shadow
until my head emerged,
my shoulders were mantled with the light,
and my whole body came up
out of the darkness, and stood
on the new shore of the day.
Where I had come was home,
for my own house stood white
where the dark river wore the earth.
The sheen of bounty was on the grass,
and the spring of the year had come.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock