Into the Trees
The Reverend Dr. Jim Nelson
May 10, 2004

So, how do you pack for a trip? This is an important question, of course, and I am sure that it says a lot about personal character. Do you pack the same way as a partner, or as your children? Me, I have my own way that is unlike the rest of my family's, and I am at a total loss to understand why they haven't simply learned from my example.

You see, before we - or just I - go on a trip, I need to start packing almost a week ahead of time so that I have adequate time to pack and re-pack, pack and re-pack, pack and re-pack to get things exactly right. I am convinced that it would be a moral failure of some sort on my part if I brought too many things, and even though suitcases are finite spaces, and I understand something about physics, it seems that there are an infinite number of ways to pack things in a suitcase. So pack and re-pack.

Did I mention that I am a little compulsive about some things? But aren't we all about some things? My family is wonderfully tolerant of me - this is an important part in all of our living - finding others who are tolerant of our idiosyncrasies, and then returning the favor and being tolerant of theirs [that's sometimes the hard part].

Along with packing, I like being early - or, conversely, hate being late - is this too much information? After all, in just a little while you will be voting on whether to call me as your senior minister and whether we should establish a partnership in ministry here at Neighborhood - best, I think, you know who I am.

In any case - we left early, as we usually did, to beat the traffic and get there on time and have a good chance at picking the room we wanted. This was some years ago, and we - Kathe, Claire, Hannah and I - were driving up to DeBenneville Pines from Costa Mesa for our church weekend. We loved going there - the Costa Mesa and Long Beach churches went each year together in an early weekend in March. There was always snow and my girls loved that. I had the mountains I love so much, and snow as well.

We got in on Friday afternoon - ahead of traffic - and settled in. I had packed exactly what I needed. Life was good! People trickled in that afternoon when it began snowing, then straggled and struggled in as it snowed in earnest. Some never made it, turned back by the snow. By late Friday night, there was a significant blanket of new snow, and we went to bed in the deep quiet of a winter's night.

I got up very early, just before dawn, and could see the sky turning just a lighter blue. The storm had passed, and the world was pure. Those tall ponderosa pines of deBenneville laden with snow, the sky turning a lighter and deeper blue, my girls deep in their sleeping bags sound asleep.

I got out my cross-country skis and went out. I am three quarters Norwegian and one-quarter Swede and there is something Scandinavian in my genes that wants to strap on skinny skis and go out into nature. It is one of my spiritual disciplines.

One fascinating element about skinny skiing is the way it moves across boundaries and edges - the boundaries of warm and cold, of forest and meadow, mountain and plain, city and wilderness.

There is something compelling about boundaries and edges. Think of the line between field and woods, between sea and sand, between mountain and plain, between sacred and secular, between city and country, between peace and war, between me and you, you and another person. Zones of transition hold a fascination. Think of the transition zones in your lives - the passages of your lives - from young to old, single to partnered, child to adult, well to sick or ill to healthy. From joy to sorrow and, finally, from life to death. The passages through which we all move.

So I went out that morning, that glorious sunlit white morning among the trees at DeBenneville Pines. It was a perfect blue wax day - some of the best skiing you could hope for, and I skied through the trees, up the hill a bit and then down for over an hour, until finally I came to a little clearing in the trees. I stopped, leaned on my poles and just looked around. There was silence - except for the intermittent ''floop' as a load of snow fell off of a branch. The light glistened - there is a poem titled 'the world is awash with diamonds' and it was that morning.

Time passed, but I don't know how much. You may know of these moments - these moments when time disappears, when infinity seems to enter your bones, these times between something, when eternity is understandable, when your soul, or your spirit - or just you - says, somehow - this is it. Something special is here.

Annie Dillard writes about this in her great, great book - one of the most influential books in my religious journey - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - about how you can take a walk one day in the woods and see all the things around you and know their seasons and their particularities, but then you can take the same walk and the world is on fire and you scarcely know your own name.

The world's literature calls these religious experiences, mystical experiences, oceanic experiences - the kind of experience in which you seem to disappear, when ego dissolves, when you become the world, when time is gone.

Maybe you know this; maybe you do not. But that day, among the trees, I felt it. In a little kid's book called 'Amos and Boris' William Steig describes how Amos, a little mouse, has built a boat [called the Rodent] and goes sailing on the ocean, and how one night, staring at the vast and star lit sky, he felt 'thoroughly akin to it all.'

Thoroughly akin to it all.

Some time passed - how much I do not know - the moment was gone. And I skied back to the lodge, changed but not changed. Annie Dillard puts it this way - 'I had been my whole life a bell, and until that moment, I did not know it, but I was lifted and struck,' She writes about the fires dwindling, the lights disappearing, the sound being silenced, but she is still spending the power of that moment. I know what she means.

Something happened in the woods that day, among the trees. It was not something I created or caused, simply something I must have been ready for - the world came to me and I was open, ready to be turned to see or hear or feel or experience something - well something very important. No amount of packing and repacking created that moment - it was a gift.

It was what Martin Buber calls an I-Thou' experience. Buber is my favorite theologian. He was a German Jew of the 20s and 30s who immigrated to Israel during the early years of the Nazis. He taught philosophy and theology; he was a scholar of Hasidism, the Jewish mystical movement of eastern Europe. In 1921, he published a little book called 'I and Thou.'

In a nutshell, Buber says this: we meet or relate to the world in one of two ways - as an object or as a subject. Buber calls this our dialogue with the world and he labels them 'I-It and I -Thou. I-It is our normal world - on the freeways, at the grocery store, when a surgeon is cutting into you - the world as object.

But, Buber, says, there are times of what he calls 'true meeting' occurs. When the world, or something in it, meets us fully, and we meet it - both are subject, both equal - an I-Thou experience.

This happens to all of us, Buber says - I remember when my girls were very little and I would go into their room at night to make sure they were breathing, and I felt it; or sometimes with friends, listening to some music, reading, being out in nature, with the person you love, maybe even in a worship service - those moments when you meet something fully and something mutual happens.

I don't pretend to understand this or even have very good words for it - there is an element of mystery here. This is where religion enters the world. Buber goes on to say that in an I-Thou relationship [he actually talks about it as speech, when we speak the primary word, I-Thou, he writes] we catch a glimpse of the Eternal Thou. This is God, or mystery, or whatever word we wish to use for that sense of that something that is greater than all but still present in each. Of the transcendent. It is what I experienced that day at DeBenneville.

And here is the key to Buber - what matters most happens in relationship. When we are open to the world or to others, we can meet them fully and this is where meaning will be found. In our being open to the world. Our life begins and it ends in relationships - this is where we meet what is holy.

He said one time that there were three great principles coming out of the democratic revolutions of the 1700s -especially those in France and in the US. They were liberty, equality and community. But, Buber said, through the 1800s and into the 1900s. liberty went west and became mere license of capitalism; equality went East and became the faceless collective of communism; and community? He was afraid that had been lost.

And so we gather here for that - to not be alone. We gather here to create a community, to be together, to share our sorrows and our joys, our struggles and our triumphs, our hopes and our dreams. Together, in community. In this world so torn asunder; in this world of such hard divisions; we need communities like this one.

Let me leave you with this story - about the power of relationship, about a holy moment, about a community of salvation:

When Beethoven created his majestic Ninth Symphony, he was totally deaf. He labored over this piece of music, knowing every sound in his mind, or in his heart, even though he could no longer hear anything.

It was music, he knew, like had never existed before. Debussy called it a universal nightmare because, for Debussy it was the piece of music against which all others must be judged and against which none could stand. Sir Georg Solti said that when the chorus enters the symphony, a new level of music happened, to use the human voice as an instrument because none other would suffice. Solti said it was the one piece he dreaded conducting because he felt inadequate.

Beethoven knew that the Ninth was special, too. He conducted the premier performance in Vienna. For the rehearsals, he refused to change a note. If the singers could not reach a note, they were to be silent. There was no room for compromise.

All of Vienna was assembled for the premier performance, and the audience sat hushed throughout because this truly was music like had never been heard. At the last note, there was a moment of profound silence from the audience. Then the crowd burst into thunderous applause.

But Beethoven stood there, his back to the audience, not knowing the reaction. Having created the ninth, he could not hear it. How alone he must have felt in that moment. Cut off from the community and the world in which his work lived. How very alone he must have felt.

Then one of the contraltos, Caroline Unger, went up to Beethoven and gently turned him around so that he could see what he could not hear. And perhaps then, Beethoven was not so alone.

Every now and then in my life, I am reminded about what truly matters and about what lies at the heart of my faith. Standing here, in front of you, for example. Feeling rather alone, wondering what you will think and how you will judge, but also knowing that I am very much not alone. I am here with friends, with those who share my belief in liberal religion, with the people of my faith.

I am here in a familiar place: a UU pulpit - a place we have dedicated to seeking, and speaking, the truth, with love. This is a place - this pulpit here and these chairs there, this room, these grounds, this community where meeting might occur, where we might speak that primary word, 'I -Thou', where we might feel 'thoroughly akin to it all.' Where, on a sunlit day or a cloudy day, on any day, any kind of day, we might be among the trees and see both the forest and the trees. A holy place, a sacred place, a place as holy as the best in our hearts and minds and souls. A place where we might turn and be turned, gently, around so that we might then not be so alone.

Amen